21L.000: Writing about Literature

Noel Jackson

Essay assignment

Please write an essay (of roughly 5 pages) on one of the following topics (see below).  I encourage you to focus your argument on a single poem, though you may of course refer to additional poems if it suits your argument, and you may if you wish develop an argument from a reading of (at most) two poems.  In any case, be sure to organize your observations and reflections into a tightly focused, coherent and contestable argument about the text(s) in question.

Though you are welcome to write about a poem we discuss in class, be sure that your argument does not simply reproduce our discussion of the text.  Be as specific as possible, and develop your argument out of your reading and close analysis of the poem.  Make sure that your quotations do some “work” for your argument:  do not, in other words, use quotations merely as filler or to illustrate an otherwise self-evident point.  By the same token, do not presume the self-evidence of your quotations, but describe what significance the quoted passage has in the context of your argument.

Topic selected by Angles authors Elizabeth Berg and Andrew Feldman:

When Wordsworth tells the reader to “think” in order to “make” (or make sense of) the tale of “Simon Lee,” he describes thinking as a productive moral activity.  In that same poem, however, thinking is also an activity partly distinguished from the performance of good deeds (such as assisting an old man in his labor).  Discuss the relationship between feeling/thought and moral action in either this poem or “The Ruined Cottage.”