Preface. Professional Acknowledgments. Foreword to Students. WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE. I. Why Write about Literature? II. For Whom Do You Write? III. Two Basic Approaches. 1. Explication. 2. Analysis. IV. Choosing a Topic. 1. Papers That Focus on a Single Literary Work. 2. Papers of Comparison and Contrast. 3. Papers on a Number of Works by a Single Author. 4. Papers on a Number of Works with Some Feature Other than Authorship in Common. V. Proving Your Point. VI. Writing the Paper. VII. Writing In-Class Essays or Essay Tests. VIII. Introducing Quotations. 1. Principles and Guidelines. IX. Documentation. 1. Textual Documentation. 2. Parenthetical Documentation. 3. Documentation by Works Cited. 4. Documentation of Electronic Sources. X. Stance and Style. XI. Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage: Common Problems. 1. Grammar. 2. Punctuation. 3. Usage. XII. Writing Samples. 1. Fiction Explication. 2. Fiction Analysis. 3. Poetry Explication. 4. Poetry Analysis. 5. Drama Explication. 6. Drama Analysis. FICTION. The Elements of Fiction. 1. Reading the Story. Reviewing Chapter One. Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game". Tobias Wolff, "Hunters in the Snow". Understanding and Evaluating Fiction. Suggestions for Writing. 2. Plot and Structure. Reviewing Chapter Two. Graham Greene, "The Destructors". Alice Munro, "How I Met My Husband". Kazuo Ishiguro, "A Family Supper". Suggestions for Writing. 3. Characterization. Reviewing Chapter Three. Alice Walker, "Everyday Use". Katherine Mansfield, "Miss Brill". James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues". James Joyce, "Araby". Suggestions for Writing. 4. Theme. Reviewing Chapter Four. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited". Anton Chekhov, "The Darling". Eudora Welty, "A Worn Path". Nadine Gordimer, "Once Upon a Time". Suggestions for Writing. 5. Point of View. Reviewing Chapter Five. Willa Cather, "Paul's Case". Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery". Katherine Anne Porter, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall". Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants". Suggestions for Writing. 6. Symbol, Allegory, and Fantasy. Reviewing Chapter Six. D. H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner". Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper". Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains". Suggestions for Writing. 7. Humor and Irony. Reviewing Chapter Seven. Daniel Orozco, "Orientation". Mark Twain, "Cannibalism in the Cars". Albert Camus, "The Guest". John Updike, "A&P". Suggestions for Writing. 8. Evaluating Fiction. Reviewing Chapter Eight. Guy de Maupassant, "The Necklace". Edith Wharton, "Roman Fever". Suggestions for Writing. Three Featured Writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown". "The Minister's Black Veil". "The Birthmark". Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". "Good Country People". "Revelation". Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" "Life After High School". "The Scarf". STORIES FOR FURTHER READING. Raymond Carver, "Neighbors". Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour". William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily". Susan Glaspell, "A Jury of Her Peers". Zora Neale Hurston, "Sweat". Henry James, "The Real Thing". Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis". Jhumpa Lahiri, "Interpreter of Maladies". Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher". Annie Proulx, "Job History". Ron Rash, "The Ascent". POETRY. The Elements of Poetry. 1. What Is Poetry? Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Eagle". William Shakespeare, "Winter". Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est". Reviewing Chapter One. Understanding and Evaluating Poetry. William Shakespeare, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Sylvia Plath, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather". John Donne, "The Triple Fool". Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Bean Eaters". Louise Gluck, "Labor Day". William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow". Elizabeth Bishop, "Filling Station". Langston Hughes, "Suicide's Note". Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Richard Cory". Ben Jonson, "On My First Son". Billy Collins, "Introduction to Poetry". Suggestions for Writing. 2. Reading the Poem. Thomas Hardy, "The Man He Killed". Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits". A.E. Housman, "Is my team plowing". Reviewing Chapter Two. John Donne, "Break of day". Emily Dickinson, "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House". Ted Hughes, "Hawk Roosting". John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy". Robert Herrick, "Upon Julia's Clothes". Sylvia Plath, "Mirror". Natasha Trethewey, "Collection Day". Walt Whitman, "The Dalliance of the Eagles". Adrienne Rich, "Storm Warnings". Suggestions for Writing. 3. Denotation and Connotation. Emily Dickinson, "There is no Frigate like a Book". William Shakespeare, "When my love swears that she is made of truth". Mary Oliver, "Spring in the Classroom". Exercises. Reviewing Chapter Three. Langston Hughes, "Cross". William Wordsworth, "The world is too much with us". Robert Frost, "Desert Places". Natasha Trethewey, "Accounting". Sharon Olds, "35/10". J. D. McClatchy, "The Ledger". Julia Alvarez, "Dusting". Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room". Wallace Stevens, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". Suggestions for Writing. 4. Imagery. Robert Browning, "Meeting at Night". Robert Browning, "Parting at Morning". Exercises. Reviewing Chapter Four. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring". William Carlos Williams, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime". Emily Dickinson, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain". Adrienne Rich, "Living in Sin". Seamus Heaney, "The Forge". Robert Frost, "After Apple-Picking". Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays". Walt Whitman, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing". Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man". John Keats, "To Autumn". Suggestions for Writing. 5. Figurative Language 1: Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Apostrophe, Metonymy. Langston Hughes, "Harlem". Emily Dickinson, "It sifts from Leaden Sieves". Anne Bradstreet, "The Author to Her Book". John Keats, "Bright Star". Exercise. Reviewing Chapter Five. Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors". Emily Dickinson, "I taste a liquor never brewed". Philip Larkin, "Toads". Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Snowstorm". Rachel Hadas, "Ghost Yogurt". Billy Collins, "Divorce". John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress". Suggestions for Writing. 6. Figurative Language 2: Symbol, Allegory. Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken". Walt Whitman, "A Noiseless Patient Spider". William Blake, "The Sick Rose". Seamus Heaney, "Digging". Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time". George Herbert, "Redemption". Exercises. Reviewing Chapter Six. Louise Gluck, "Purple Bathing Suit". Clive James, "Whitman and the Moth". Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell". Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice". Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death". John Donne, "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness". Sylvia Plath, "Spinster". Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses". Suggestions for Writing. 7. Figurative Language 3: Paradox, Overstatement, Understatement, Irony. Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness is divinest Sense". John Donne, "The Sun Rising". Marge Piercy, "Barbie Doll". William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper". Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias". Exercise. Reviewing Chapter Seven. William Wordsworth, "A slumber did my spirit seal". John Donne, "Batter my heart, three-personed God". Seamus Heaney, "Mid-Term Break". W. H. Auden, "The Unknown Citizen". Lucille Clifton, "In the inner city". Emily Dickinson, "What Soft--Cherubic Creatures". Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz". Sylvia Plath, "The Colossus". Robert Browning, "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister". Suggestions for Writing. 8. Allusion. Robert Frost, "Out, Out--". William Shakespeare from Macbeth ("She should have died hereafter"). Sylvia Plath, "Wuthering Heights". Reviewing Chapter Eight. Louise Gluck, Eurydice. e. e. cummings, "in Just-". John Milton, "On His Blindness". Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy". Sharon Olds, "My Son the Man". T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi". Billy Collins, "Genesis". William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan". Emily Dickinson, "A little East of Jordan". Rita Dove, "Persephone, Falling". Suggestions for Writing. 9. Meaning and Idea. A. E. Housman, "Loveliest of Trees". Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". Reviewing Chapter Nine. Emily Dickinson, "Four Trees--upon a solitary Acre". Robert Frost, "Design." e. e. cummings, "O sweet spontaneous". Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer". John Keats, "On the Sonnet". Billy Collins, "Sonnet". Natasha Trethewey, "Southern History". Rita Dove, "Kentucky, 1833". William Blake, "The Lamb". William Blake, "The Tiger". Suggestions for Writing. 10. Tone. Denise Levertov, "To the Snake". Emily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass". Michael Drayton, "Since there's no help". Louise Gluck, "Lost Love". Reviewing Chapter Ten. William Shakespeare, "My mistress' eyes". Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar". Thomas Hardy, "The Oxen". John Donne, "The Flea". Sharon Olds, "Bop after Hip Op". William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children". Natasha Trethewey, "History Lesson". Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach". Philip Larkin, "Church Going". Alexander Pope, "Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness". Suggestions for Writing. 11. Musical Devices. W. H. Auden, "The night when joy began". Theodore Roethke, "The Waking". Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur". Exercise. Reviewing Chapter Eleven. William Shakespeare, "Blow, blow, thou winter wind". Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool". Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Counting-Out Rhyme". Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells". Sylvia Plath, "Morning Song". Sharon Olds, "Rite of Passage". Mary Oliver, "Music Lessons". William Stafford, "Traveling through the dark". Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay". Suggestions for Writing. 12. Rhythm and Meter. George Herbert, "Virtue". Exercises. Reviewing Chapter Twelve. William Blake, "Introduction to Songs of Innocence". Walt Whitman, "Had I the Choice". George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Stanzas". Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia". Sylvia Plath, "Old Ladies' Home". Linda Pastan, "To a Daughter Leaving Home". Robert Browning, "Porphyria's Lover". Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Break, break, break". Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee" Suggestions for Writing. 13. Sound and Meaning. Anonymous, "Pease Porridge Hot". E. Housman, "Eight O'Clock". Alexander Pope, "Sound and Sense". Emily Dickinson, "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died". Exercise. Reviewing Chapter Thirteen. Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth". Sylvia Plath, "Suicide off Egg Rock". Pattiann Rogers, "Night and the Creation of Geography". Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers". Galway Kinnell, "Blackberry Eating". Seamus Heaney, "The Skunk". Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill". William Carlos Williams, "The Dance". Suggestions for Writing." 14. Pattern. George Herbert, "The Pulley". John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer". William Shakespeare, "That time of year". Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night". Exercises. Reviewing Chapter Fourteen. Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art". Sylvia Plath, "Mad Girl's Love Song". William Shakespeare, "From Romeo and Juliet". John Donne, "Death, be not proud". William Butler Yeats, "The Folly of Being Comforted". Claude McKay, "The White City". Billy Collins, "Villanelle". Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask". Robert Frost, "Acquainted with the Night". Seamus Heaney, "Villanelle for an Anniversary". Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder". Suggestions for Writing. 15. Evaluating Poetry 1: Sentimental, Rhetorical, Didactic Verse. Reviewing Chapter Fifteen. "God's Will for You and Me". "Pied Beauty". "Pitcher". "The Old-Fashioned Pitcher". "A Poison Tree". "The Most Vital Thing in Life". "Lower New York: At Dawn". "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802". "Piano". "The Days Gone By". "I would not paint--a picture". "If I can stop one Heart from breaking". "When I have fears that I may cease to be". "O Solitude!" Suggestions for Writing. 16. Evaluating Poetry 2: Poetic Excellence. John Donne, "The Canonization". Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind". "John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess". Emily Dickinson, "There's a certain Slant of light". Robert Frost, "Home Burial". T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium". Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning". Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues". Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish". Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus". FEATURED POETS. The following poems appear as illustrations in various chapters of the book, but these five poets are represented by a sufficient number of poems to warrant studying them as individual artists. Approaches to analysis and writing are suggested on pages x-x of this book. Emily Dickinson, "A little East of Jordan". "A narrow Fellow in the Grass". "Because I could not stop for Death". "Four Trees--upon a solitary Acre". "I died for Beauty--but was scarce". "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain". "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died". "I taste a liquor never brewed". "I would not paint--a picture". "If I can stop one Heart from breaking". "It sifts from Leaden Sieves". "Much Madness is divinest Sense". "There is no Frigate like a book". "There's a certain Slant of light". "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House". "What Soft--Cherubic Creatures". John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". "Batter my heart, three-personed God". "Break of Day". "Death, be not proud". "Hymn to God My God, in my Sickness". "Song: Go and catch a falling star". "The Apparition". "The Canonization". "The Flea". "The Good-Morrow". "The Sun Rising". "The Triple Fool". Robert Frost, "Acquainted with the Night". "After Apple-Picking". "Birches". "Desert Places". "Design". "Fire and Ice". "Home Burial". "Mending Wall". "Nothing Gold Can Stay". "Out, Out--". "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". "The Aim Was Song". "The Road Not Taken". "The Silken Tent". John Keats, "Bright Star". "La Belle Dame sans Merci". "O Solitude!" "Ode on a Grecian Urn". "Ode on Melancholy". "Ode to a Nightingale". "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer". "On the Sonnet". "This living hand". "To Autumn". "To Sleep". "When I have fears that I may cease to be". Sylvia Plath, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather". "Lady Lazarus". "Mad Girl's Love Song". "Metaphors". "Mirror". "Morning Song". "Old Ladies' Home". "Spinster". "Suicide off Egg Rock". "The Colossus". "Wuthering Heights". A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION. These five contemporary poets are represented by at least six poems each, included at various points in the book. They offer students the opportunity to sample at greater lengths the works of poets of their own time. Approaches to analysis and writing are suggested on pages x-x of this book. Billy Collins, "Divorce". "Genesis". "Introduction to Poetry". "The Dead". "Villanelle". "Weighing the Dog". Louise Gluck, "Cousins". "Eurydice". "Labor Day". "Lost Love". "Primavera". "Purple Bathing Suit". Seamus Heaney, "Digging". "Follower". "Mid-Term Break". "The Forge". "The Skunk". "Villanelle for an Anniversary". Sharon Olds, "Bop after Hip Op". "I Go Back to May 1937". "My Son the Man". "Rite of Passage". "The Connoisseuse of Slugs". "35/10". Natasha Trethewey, "Accounting". "Blond". "Collection Day". "History Lesson". "Miscegenation". "Southern History". PART III: POEMS FOR FURTHER READING. Kim Addonizio, "Sonnenizio on a Line from Drayton". W. H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts". Aphra Behn, "On Her Loving Two Equally". Elizabeth Bishop, "Manners". William Blake, "The Garden of Love". Gwendolyn Brooks, "a song in the front yard". George Gordon, Lord Byron, "She Walks in Beauty". Amy Clampitt, "Witness". Lucille Clifton, "good times". Henri Cole, "Mask". Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan". Billy Collins, "The Dead". Billy Collins, "Weighing the Dog". Stephen Crane, "War Is Kind". e. e. cummings, "Buffalo Bill's defunct". e. e. cummings, "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls". Emily Dickinson, "I died for Beauty--but was scarce". John Donne, "Song: Go and catch a falling star". John Donne, "The Apparition". John Donne, "The Good-Morrow". Mark Doty, "Pescadero". Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Sympathy". Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, "I Sit and Sew". Robert Frost, "Birches". Robert Frost, "Mending Wall". Louise Gluck, "Cousins". Louise Gluck, "Primavera". Thomas Hardy, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" Thomas Hardy, "Channel Firing". Thomas Hardy, "Hap". Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush". Thomas Hardy, "The Ruined Maid". Seamus Heaney, "Follower". George Herbert, "Love". George Herbert, "Peace". A.E. Housman, "Terence, this is stupid stuff". A.E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young". Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B". Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner". Ben Jonson, "Still to be neat". Ben Jonson, "To Celia". John Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci". John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale". John Keats, "This living hand". John Keats, "To Sleep". Galway Kinnell, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps". Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica". Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love". Cleopatra Mathis, "Survival: A Guide". Judson Mitcham, "Story". Judson Mitcham, "Stroke". Meghan O'Rourke, "Apartment Living". Joyce Carol Oates, "Bloodline, Elegy: Su Qijian Family, Beijing". Joyce Carol Oates, "Playlet for Voices". Sharon Olds, "I Go Back to May 1937". Sharon Olds, "The Connoisseuse of Slugs". Katha Pollitt, "Moth". Alexander Pope, "Ode on Solitude". Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Eros Turannos". Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Mr. Flood's Party". Christina Rossetti, "Song". Christina Rossetti, "Up-Hill". William Shakespeare, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds". Edmund Spenser, "One day I wrote her name upon the strand". Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar". Jonathan Swift, "A Description of the Morning". Natasha Trethewey, "Blond". Natasha Trethewey, "Miscegenation". Walt Whitman, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim". Walt Whitman, "Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted". William Carlos Williams, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime". William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud". William Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up when I behold". William Wordsworth, "The Solitary Reaper". Thomas Wyatt, "My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness". William Butler Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree". William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming". William Butler Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus". William Butler Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole". DRAMA. The Elements of Drama. 1. The Nature of Drama. Reviewing Chapter One. Understanding and Evaluating Drama. John Millington Synge, RIDERS TO THE SEA. Susan Glaspell, TRIFLES. Jane Martin, RODEO. Lynn Nottage, POOF! David Ives, TIME FLIES. Suggestions for Writing. 2. Realistic and Nonrealistic Drama. Reviewing Chapter Two. Henrik Ibsen, A DOLL HOUSE. Tennessee Williams, THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Luis Valdez, LOS VENDIDOS. Suggestions for Writing. 3. Tragedy and Comedy. Reviewing Chapter Three. Sophocles, OEDIPUS. William Shakespeare, OTHELLO. Anton Chekhov, THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Moliere, THE MISANTHROPE. Oscar Wilde, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Suggestions for Writing. PLAYS FOR FURTHER READING. Emily Mann, MRS. PACKARD. Neil LaBute, THE WAGER. LeRoi Jones, DUTCHMAN. Wendy Wasserstein, TENDER OFFER. Glossary of Terms. Copyrights and Acknowledgments. Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines.