Prose/Poetry Essays
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S. Traner/12AP English
Look for shifts in tone, speaker and setting…there will be at least one.
Circle your buts, and other transitional words…they mark changes in tone.
Know the major concepts of the time periods and authors from those periods:
o Elizabethans (1485-1660): saw contest between secular love and love of God
 Carpe Diem and Sonnets
 William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
 Metaphysical poetry and John Donne
o Restoration (1660-1798): age of reason and scientific view of God
 Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels)
o Romantics (1798-1832): love or nature and saw God in nature
 William Blake (“Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”)
 William Wordsworth (sunrise/sunset theory and “Tintern Abbey”)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)
 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
 Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)
o Victorians (1832-1901): saw nature as a threat to mankind, and God being replaced with
the elements of the industrial age—realism
 Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)—early Victorian, still influenced by
Romanticism but there is a more realistic element in the mix—Gothicism with
social commentary, not as optimistic
o The Moderns (1901-1940ish): see God as dead and man as hollow, unwanted and
unsafe in an alien world
 Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)
 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
 F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
 Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome)
 John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath) 1939
o The Post-Moderns (1940ish-present): see life as an accident, fragmented, purposeless
 Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)
 Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)
If you are blank at the test and all strategies haven’t worked:
1. look for 2-4 lines that connect of which you can make sense.
2. discuss that section alone in terms of the prompt
Review literary terms in your class notes and those on the terms list.
Review Emily Dickinson’s poetry. They love her on the test.
Study your handouts on reacting to prose and poetry selections. Be able to identify any of the
following:
o Syntax
o Diction
o Figurative language
o Imagery
o Tone
o Irony
o Style
o Types of sentences
o Organization
o Structure
o Point of view
Final Review 2008