Tips for Writing Essays About
Poetry
Writing Analytically about Literature:
The Basics
• Assume your audience has read and
understood the works of literature. You do
not need to summarize the events of the
entire work, though brief reminders of the
events directly surrounding the sections you
are quoting may be appropriate.
• Literary critics write about events in literature
in present tense.
So if I’m not summarizing… what am I
supposed to say in my essay?
• Because you are assuming your audience has
already read the literature, your job is to point
out things about the work(s) that your audience
may not have noticed or thought about.
• This may include analysis/close reading of the
literature, comparisons of relevant sections of
two or more works and discussion of those
comparisons’ significance, or (in later essays)
discussion of other critics’ reaction to the work.
Literary Analysis and Tone
• The tone of a literary analysis is expected to be academic and
professional. Most literary critics maintain a certain distance
from the works they write about. This means that they avoid
the extremes of gushing about the work on one hand and raging
angrily about it on the other. (Remember, it is not your job to
judge whether or not a work is good/bad or moral/immoral.
Your job is to analyze and explain the literary elements of the
work(s). If you really hate a work THAT MUCH, don’t write
about it.)
• Severely limit the use of first person pronouns. In rare cases,
including personal experience may be appropriate in an intro or
conclusion, but in general, leave “I” and “me” out of the body of
your essay. (Also, there is no need to tell the story of how you
chose your subject. Since you are writing about the works, I’m
going to assume that you found something of interest in them.)
Textbook/Website Resources
• Chapter 1, “Reading and Writing About
Literature,” is on p. 2, and the section on writing
starts on p. 6.
• Two example student papers can be found
beginning on p. 22.
• Chapter 2, “Writing Literary Arguments,” is on p.
36, an another example essay is on p. 44.
• Check the course website for additional resources
about how to write about poetry and do a close
reading. Close reading is a skill that will be useful
to you as you prepare to write Essay #2.
Using Quotes to Support Your Claim
• In earlier classes, you probably learned that
when you write an essay, you make a claim
and support it with evidence.
• The same is true for essays about literature.
The difference is, the claim you are making is
about the literature, and the evidence you
support it with comes from the literature
itself, along with your explanation of the
evidence you chose.
When Quoting Poetry….
• You can quote several lines together, a single line,
or a few words, whichever suits your purpose
best.
• HOWEVER, you need to make sure that you do
not pull quotes out of context.
• Example of a quote out of context:
• Matthew Arnold celebrates the beauty of
creation when he writes in “Dover Beach” that
the world is “So various, so beautiful, so new”
(line 32). (This poem is on p. 677-678.)
• What is wrong with the quote use above?
MLA Format for Quotes from Poems
• If all of the words in your quote come from a single
line, MLA format requires that you follow the
quotation with the word “line” and the line number in
parentheses after the quote the first time you use it,
and just the line numbers each time after that.
• Example of using quotes from a single line:
• In “Ozymandias,” Shelley creates irony by placing
words with connotations of grandeur and words with
connotations of destruction near one another. The
statue’s legs are both “vast and trunkless” (line 2), and
near the end of the poem it is described as a “colossal
wreck” (14).
MLA Format for Quotes from Poems
• Example of using two or three lines:
• The speaker of “Traveling through the Dark”
shows an almost uncomfortable awareness of his
place in the natural world when he says, “I stood
in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; /
around our group I could hear the wilderness
listen” (lines 15-16).
• See p. 58 for textbook example of in-text citation.
• See p. 62 for textbook example of works cited for
a poem in an anthology.