The Microessay

The purpose of the microessay is to give you practice in the fundamentals of writing literary criticism: supporting a claim about the meaning of a text, using specific quotes as evidence, citing poems using MLA format. Follow these guidelines exactly:

• The micro-essay should consist of a single paragraph of no more than one and a half pages double spaced.
• Give your essay a title which is specific enough to give the reader a sense of what the essay is about and as interesting as possible.
• Begin the essay with a specific claim which is about the meaning of the text (as opposed to the text's literary merit, your own views on the ideas and issues raised in the text, the characters in the text as if they were real people, etc.) and which answers one of the questions below. Don't waste space with introductory fluff.
• The claim should be argumentative rather than descriptive--that is, it should be a claim which could be disputed (as opposed to a claim which states an inarguable fact).
• Your argument should be original in some way; go beyond what was said in class.
• Support the claim with specific evidence from the text. Use quotes rather than paraphrases where possible--and even when a paraphrase is necessary (e.g. when your evidence is an event or series of events in the plot rather than a specific passage), try to bolster the paraphrase by including short quoted phrases.
• Document your source (the poem you are writing about) in MLA parenthetic style.
  • Since for this assignment you should be quoting three or fewer lines of poetry at a time, quote the lines in quotation marks within the text of your essay. Indicate where lines break with a slash with a space on both sides. (Quotes of more than three lines, which you are likely to need in longer papers, should be set off from the text and indented one inch, without quotation marks; line breaks should be reproduced as they appear in the original.)
  • Unlike stories, poems are usually cited by division (e.g. canto, book or part) and line numbers rather than page numbers in the parenthetic reference. Division and line numbers are separated by a period. If you are citing only line numbers because the poem has no divisions, include "line" or "lines" (not "l." or "ll.") in the first quote only; thereafter, use only line numbers. Include the author's last name in the first quote only if you have not identified the author in the text of the essay (for this assignment, you probably should identify the author in your text).
  • For quotes in the text of your essay, the parenthetic reference should come after the quotation mark and before the period. (For indented quotes, the parenthetic reference should come after the period and one space.)
  • Include a "Works Cited" section and cite the bibliographic information correctly. Include the author, poem title (in quotes unless the poem was originally published as a book in its own right), anthology title (underlined or italicized), editor name, city of publication, abbreviated publisher name, date, and page numbers, punctuated as in the example.
• Be sure that your argument and its evidence is presented in a clear, organized fashion. The paragraph should be unified and coherent--that is, every part of the microessay should serve to support your central claim, and every sentence should follow clearly from the sentence before and lead clearly to the sentence after.

I will grade this assignment on the quality of its interpretation, argumentation, structure, and use of correct forms, more or less in that order of importance.

Choose one of the topics below:

1. In Edward Taylor's "Huswifery," do the metaphors of spinning and weaving emphasize or deemphasize the importance of individual action?
2. How does Philip Freneau's "On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man" portray America's relationship (or future relationship) with other nations?
3. William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" uses the words "solitary," "lone," and "alone"; what is the importance in the poem of being alone?
4. How does Whitman represent America within the world's civilizations in "Facing West from California's Shores"?
5. Is Emily Dickinson's "Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant" itself told "slant"? Either way, what does the way the poem expresses its point suggest about the meaning of "slant"?
6. What specifically does the blackbird represent in part 5 of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"? (One way to address this question: What is the difference between inflections and innuendoes, and how is the image of the blackbird used to make the point Stevens is making with that distinction?)
7. In the context of the poem as a whole, what does the line "my soul has grown deep like rivers" mean in Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"?
8. The title of Michael Harper's "American History" is ambiguous--"history" can refer either to events in the past or to a narrative about events in the past. Which kind of history is the poem about, and what does the poem say about it?
9. Given the distinction that Jorie Graham makes in "The Geese" between spider webs and geese, why is "the everyday" described at the end of the poem as "this astonishing delay"?
10. Discuss any narrowly defined issue in a poem that we read during the "whirlwind tour" section of the class in a way in which we have not discussed that particular poem in class. Your argument about the poem must be original and your approach to it should be at least comparable in complexity to those of the assignments listed above. If you choose this option, you MUST run your idea by me in advance.