Reading Assignments

Note: the reading assignments and discussion assignments are closely integrated in a step by step process.  Follow instructions carefully.   You'll want to get started early!

Step One:

Read Meyer, Chapters 19 and 20. These chapters will help you to get a "feel" for poetry, and offer good suggestions and samples of analysis.

Then read:

pg. 574 The Fish

pg. 745 My Papa's Waltz

pg. 624 To His Coy Mistress

Without consulting any sources, make brief notes about your first impressions of each poem.

Don't read any of the surrounding analysis of these poems if you find it in the text.  Focus only on the poems.

Step 2 (by Wednesday)

Before proceeding to the next reading assignment, which is Step 3, complete Discussion assignment 1:
On the  Three Poems Poetry Forum by Wednesday, reply to all three of my prompts for Week 10  Discussion Assignment.  You'll need the brief notes you made on the 3 poems you read in step 1:  "The Fish," My Papa's Waltz," and "To His Coy Mistress."

Step 3

Read (online--click on link below)

Elements of Poetry  Click on each element, read the definition, and then click on the links that show how each element functions in the example poems.  Make sure you  listen to the audio versions of each poem as well. 

Step 4 (by Friday) 

Discussion assignment 2:
On the Three Poems Poetry Forum by Friday, go to your post (from Wednesday) for each of the three poems, and reply to yourself.  How has  knowing how the elements of poetry function in each poem and hearing each poem read enhanced or changed you first impression? 

Step 5 (by Monday of next week)

Read and reply to the posts above and below yours in each poem's thread

Writing Assignments

On Monday, by 10 PM submit Essay Two (Drama Analysis) via email (copy and paste) and the digital drop box on Blackboard (attachment).  

Packet Requirements

Include these clearly marked documents:
Final Draft and Works Cited Page
Review Record

Reading Quiz:

Don't forget to take the Elements of Drama Quiz--it will disappear on Sunday.

Reading  Ahead

Read Marianne Moore's "Poetry," below.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a



high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand: the bat

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to 



eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

      nor is it valid

         to discriminate against "business documents and



school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make

      a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

      result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present



for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness and

      that which is on the other hand

         genuine, you are interested in poetry.