ENG 241: American Literature II Response Paper #2 100 Points

ENG 241: American Literature II Response Paper #2 [100 Points]

For your second response paper, write an explication of one of the following poems. Please note the change in due date to Wednesday, March 9 at 11:59 p.m. To assist you with the concept of explicating a poem, I am providing both some advice below the list of poems and a link to a University of North Carolina statement on poetry explication. Please note that I require a slightly different opening to your essay than that described by North Carolina, Use the information at the website for further assistance regarding poetic form to supplement what we discussed in class. The website also provides useful supplementary commentary on how to discuss the situation and speaker of a poem.

Write an explication of ONE of the following poems:

Robert Frost: “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” OR “Stopping by the Woods…”

Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice Cream” OR “Sunday Morning.”

William Carlos Williams: “The Young Housewife.”

Marianne Moore: “To a Snail” OR “The Paper Nautilus.”

Please note that a poetry explication is a personal response to a poem. DO NOT consult or rely on any outside sources for your discussion of the poem. You may, of course, cite explanatory notes from our textbook, but your response to the poem should be entirely a function of your own reading and analysis.

Instructions for Writing and Submitting the Explication:

Present your double-spaced, typed paper using times New Roman or Cambria 12 font; use 1" margins on all four sides of the page. Insert page numbers in the upper right hand corner beginning with page one. You will need to re-set your margins if using MS Word, for the Word default is 1.25" margins. You also need to use format paragraph to eliminate the extra space [10 pt.] that Word automatically puts after each paragraph. Put your name, the course, my name, and the date of submission in the upper left hand corner of page one. Do not use a title page; instead, simply center your title on page one just above your initial paragraph. Of course, paper titles capitalize the first letter of each word [except for prepositions]; your title should NOT be underlined or put in bold type or quotation marks.
Introduce the poem, poet, and year of publication in the opening line of your explication. For example, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) dramatizes…
Document according to MLA style for presenting Quotes from poems. That is, instead of putting page numbers in the parentheses, document quotations using the line number from the poem. For example, Williams’s speaker compares the housewife to “a fallen leaf” (9). If you are citing more than one line from a poem in a single quotation, block the quoted lines, setting them off by one inch from your paragraph spacing.
Paper Length: 3-4 typewritten pages [1,000-1,300 words]; when judging your paper’s length, use the word count function to determine whether you have written more than 1,000 words.
Paper Due Date: Wednesday, March 9, no later than 11:59 p.m.
Submit your paper as an e-mail attachment to my ISU e-mail address:

Title your MS Word file with your last name followed by your topic designation. For example, if I were submitting a paper on a Robert Frost poem, my Word file would be titled Jakaitis.Frost paper.docx.