You will write a paper of interpretive literary criticism on two of the poems from the Close Reading Packet: The Best American Poems 2017.
Task: You will write a paper of interpretive literary criticism on two of the poems from the Close Reading Packet: The Best American Poems 2017. You will analyze the two poems individually in the body of your essays, in effect writing two short papers. But you will also compare and contrast them in the conclusion (and in the introduction), showing some pattern or connection between the two poems as you have interpreted and analyzed them according to the principles of New Criticism. Do they handle tension in similar/different ways? Do they make use of nature imagery in similar/different ways? Do they utilize figures of sound to convey their subjects and themes?
Your method of interpretation must make use of the Tyson chapter on New Critical theory as well as the many poetic tools we have discussed in class. According to Tyson, the New Critics ask only one complex question about texts: “What single interpretation of the text best establishes its organic unity? In other words, how do the text’s formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning, of the work?”
But as I have stated from the beginning, I am less concerned about what these poems mean than how they mean. So, tell me the how of the poems: their rhythms, rhymes, metaphors, similes, figures of speech, images, and sounds. But try to bind these observations together with a why using one of the four linguistic features the New Critics valued: ambiguity, irony, paradox, and/or tension. So you might write an essay that:
examines how rhythms, rhymes, metaphors, similes, figures of speech, images, and sounds work together to create a central tension in the poem, perhaps between sets of images or between meaning and language or between potential themes, OR
examines how rhythms, rhymes, etc. work together to create ambiguities about individual images or the poem as a whole that may or may not get resolved into an organic unity by the end, OR
examines how rhythms, rhymes, etc. work together to create ironies or a main irony, that is a meaning that seems to accept varying, even conflicting, perspectives, which Harold Bloom described as “being true and false at the same time,” OR
examines how rhythms, rhymes, etc. work together to create paradoxes which reflect the complexity of human experience
Answer preview You will write a paper of interpretive literary criticism on two of the poems from the Close Reading Packet: The Best American Poems 2017.
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