Poetry

Option four: examine a poem that deals with love or eroticism, and relate it to other poems on this topic.

Possibilities include Anonymous, “Alison”; Anonymous, “Western Wind”; Anonymous, “There Is a Lady Sweet and Kind”; Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”; Edmund Spenser, excerpts from Amoretti; Sir Philip Sidney, excerpts from Astrophil and Stella; Samuel Daniel, excerpts from Delia; Michael Drayton, excerpts from Idea; Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”; Thomas Campion, “My Sweetest Lesbia”; John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”; Ben Jonson, “Though I Am Young and Cannot Tell”; Lady Mary Wroth, three sonnets from A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love; George Herbert, “Love (III)”; John Milton, “Methought I Saw”; Andrew Marvell, “The Definition of Love”; Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty,” “When We Two Parted,” “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving”; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, excerpts from Sonnets from the Portuguese; Dickinson, #249 (“Wild Nights—WildNights!”); e. e. Cummings, “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond”; Robert Graves, “Love Without Hope”; W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”; Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”; Gary Snyder, “Four Poems for Robin”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Living in Sin.”

Rules

In your essay you must use and cite at least three outside sources; you must quote in some form from at least two. “Outside sources” are texts that are neither the primary subject of your paper nor readings on the course syllabus; presumably they will be critical or historical texts. At least one source must be an article in a scholarly journal (e.g., The Journal of Modern History, Contemporary Literature). At least one outside source should be a book published by a university press (e.g., University of North Carolina Press, Stanford University Press), although I am not insisting that you utilize such a book, given COVID-19 restrictions.

You should end your essay with a Works Cited page. Attributions to the works listed there should be given parenthetically in your essay.

The best research tool for locating relevant secondary sources is the MLA International Bibliography, conveniently available on our library’s web page. Click on “Research Databases”; scroll down to “MLA International Bibliography” and click; put in your information; and then search under “subject.”

Any essay that fails to observe the guidelines on format provided early in the course will be returned to its author, who must hand in a corrected version. The student will receive the usual penalty for a late paper, one full grade, and will be penalized another full grade for each day the essay is late after the first.