Required sources: Description of a City Shower by Jonathan SwiftIntroduction Paragraph: What you think the poem is about?Topic: In this paper, I want you to demonstrate how the overall meaning of any one poem is reflected at the local or micro level in the poets versification. Begin by explaining what you take to be the primary or most urgent idea behind the poem. Then focus on a passage that richly enacts that content. Explain through formal analysis and close reading (that is, by unpacking both form and content) how the purpose of the poemits message, its politics, its ideologyis given special animation in the lines youve chosen. How has the poet harnessed language into particular poetic conventions or events to convey her meaning? Build this paper around no more than two examples.***USE QUOTES FROM POEMSkills: This exercise calls on the skills of close reading that were introduced in your first assignment (please review that assignment). More specifically, this time I ask you to focus with precision on the formal aspects of versification: meter, rhyme, substitutions, verse form, figures of speech, and so on (drawing both on our glossary readings and, more importantly, our class conversations about these formal aspects of poetry). I also ask you to go a step beyond the critical observations I asked for in the first paper and, this time, to extrapolate or speculate about the larger significance of the observations youre making. Once youve explained how the poet encapsulates and reinforces meaning through certain formal techniques, remark on how such local meaning generates broad, overall, critical, conceptual meaning. Whats the big idea in play? This step, which ideally will structure every instance of close reading you perform in your longer essays, is where you start asserting your authority and creativity as an interpreter of texts. Its where your papers get their ambition and their punch, and its where each of you starts to really develop uniqueness of thought. But remember: while intellectual creativity is great, your speculations need to remain rooted in textual evidencethat is, in your quotations.Format and Organization: See your MLA handout, and heres a cheat sheet:
Double-spacing; single-space block quotations
Times New Roman 12-pt font
1-inch margins (change in MS Word as needed)
Page numbers, upper right
A heading that is single-spaced, including your name, course number, and the date