British Literary Tradition 1, fall 200
paper 1 assignment

Compare one of Sidney’s sonnets from Astrophil and Stella to a poem from Surrey, Wyatt, Chaucer, or Beowulf (obviously a short section from one of the latter two).

Papers should be 3-4 pages, double-spaced, in a standard font, with standard margins, etc. Title pages are not necessary.

This is not a regular paper but a series of exercises designed to give you practice with close reading and textual analysis.

Think about the paper in three parts: a detailed discussion of each poem (approximately a page each), followed by a comparison (about a page). In the comparison you may want to address one or more of the following questions: What is the project of the poem? How does each poem understand poetry in general, its purposes, uses, capabilities? How do the poems’ forms relate to their contents?

Your analysis of each poem should begin with a specific claim (the point you want to make about it), and then a discussion of the poem that supports your claim.

Note the order: your analysis should be organized by a point and your discussions should refer back to that point.

But also note that your claim may not be apparent to you until you’ve actually written your account of the poem. Drafts are occasions to work out your understanding of the material. And if you don’t know exactly what your main claim is at the beginning, that’s ok. Start writing about what is happening and you will (really!) arrive at something by the end of your discussion.

It is the work of editing to rearrange your analysis into a reader-friendly format that will allow the reader to see your claim and follow your discussion as an explanation of that point. The points that come first in your final draft are often what you arrive at last in your early draft.

Analytic points (or claims) are these kinds of statements (note that each addresses some "problem" the poem is worrying about):

     Chaucer’s "Prologue" presents a tension between social assumptions and a messier reality by presenting the pilgrims in "proper" order but undercutting this in the individual portraits’ details.

     The aggressive imagery in Wyatt’s poem shows an ambivalence about the civility its Petrarchan form initially promises.

     Sidney’s sonnet addresses the difficulty of saying what you really feel if you must use the same words that other (bad) poets use.

On Monday (9/25) bring your rough draft to class. These will collected and redistributed to classmates for revision in our workshop. This will allow each of you to practice revision on someone else’s paper and have the benefit of someone else’s comments on your own. (You may of course keep your paper anonymous.)

Revised, final drafts are due in class on Wednesday (9/27)—please hand in your draft along with your final paper.