Brief samples of explications

Here is an example of a close reading of a poem.  Actually, there are two examples.  Note that Paglia does not use outside criticism.  You, of course, will. 

Poetry Research Paper

Poetry Paper
For this assignment, you will explicate a poem by one of the poets listed below.  You will use published literary criticism to enhance your explication, so be sure to choose a “canonical” poem.
Your explication will be a 5-7 page, typed, double-spaced research paper.  You must use at least five cited sources; they may be articles from books, journals, or databases.  Sparknotes, Wikipedia articles, Cliff’s Notes, and the like are not acceptable.  I have links to some useful internet sites on my webpage.  Additionally, the AHS library databases and ebooks are essential resources.
• Please provide a copy of the poem with your paper.
• Please print a copy of your paper.  Electronic copies will not be accepted.  It is especially important that you provide a hard copy of your rough drafts, since you will need it for peer review during class.
• Your paper must meet MLA guidelines.

The Poets:
Sherman Alexie, A.R. Ammons; Matthew Arnold; Margaret Atwood; John Ashbery; W.H. Auden; Aphra Behn; John Berryman; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Gwendolyn Brooks; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; Hart Crane; Robert Creeley; e.e. cummings; H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); James Dickey; Emily Dickinson; John Donne; John Dryden; Paul Laurence Dunbar; T.S. Eliot; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Robert Frost (NOT “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “The Road Not Taken”); Allen Ginsberg; Thomas Hardy; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert; Robert Herrick; Geoffrey Hill; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; James Joyce; John Keats; Kenneth Koch; Ted Kooser; Philip Larkin; D.H. Lawrence; Denise Levertov; Amy Lowell; Robert Lowell; Andrew Marvell; Herman Melville; Edna St. Vincent Millay; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Frank O’Hara; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allen Poe (NOT “The Raven” or “Annabel Lee”); Alexander Pope; Ezra Pound; Adrienne Rich; Edwin Arlington Robinson; Theodore Roethke; Christina Rossetti; Muriel Rukeyser; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Sir Philip Sidney; Stevie Smith; Gary Snyder; Edmund Spenser; William Stafford; Wallace Stevens; May Swenson; Sarah Teasdale; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Dylan Thomas; Derek Walcott; Robert  Penn Warren; Phillis Wheatley; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; James Wright; William Butler Yeats

• Rough drafts are due and ready for peer review: 9 April
• Final drafts are due: 16 April


Please do not plagiarize.

Godot Project

Write an additional scene for Waiting for Godot.
It should be two to three pages long.
I would prefer it to be typed.
It must be “true to the spirit of the play.”
Due March 6th