SAMPLE A.P. ESSAY INTRODUCTIONS
1.
Though these two poems by Dickinson and Frost share the element of dark or night, the poets
speak from very different perspectives. Dickinson's "darkness" connotes uncertainty and change,
while the speaker of Frost's poem imbues night with a far more negative and desolate meaning.
2.
The journey of mankind has been a long and arduous path, without the accomplishment of
actually discovering the meaning of life. In the novel Candide, the young noble travels around
the world in order to answer a single question, "Is this the best of all possible worlds?" Even as
the world seems to be against him, Candide is unable to comprehend why this world should not
be the best of all possible worlds. Why would God create a world that is not the best possible?
Candide continues to travel around the world intent upon finding the answer to the age-old
question.
3.
People's attitudes toward Eros, the Greek god of love, often mirror their own opinions about love
itself. Thus, since many are perplexed and frustrated by love, they have mixed feelings about
Eros. Both Robert Bridges and Anne Stevenson express this confusion in their poems addressed
to Eros; however, they clearly have different underlying assumptions about love.
4.
The concluding scene of King Lear, in which Lear dies while clutching the lifeless body of his
youngest daughter, Cordelia, serves to illuminate the greater meaning of the work as a whole.
Lear had previously banished Cordelia, the only daughter who truly loved him, from his
Kingdom. It is not until this final scene when Lear realizes Cordelia's love after the treachery of
his other daughters, Regan and Goneril, and overcomes his earlier blindness. Lear's conflict is
finally and tragically resolved, and with it all of his preceding torment.
5.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the seminal twentieth-century American novel, and
while being a vivid and enthralling illustration of the Jazz Age, it is entirely tragic in scope on all
three scales of tragedy – personal, inter-personal, and societal. The tragic figure, of course, is
Jay Gastsby.
6.
In a scene from the novel Kiss and Tell, British novelist Alain de Botton humorously depicts the
relationship between a set of socially oblivious, rather crass parents and their embarrassed adult
daughter Isabel. Using believable dialogue; detailed, vivid characterization; and an absurd
situation, de Botton creates a scene that brings comic delight out of the universal experience of a
child's humiliation by her parents.
7.
To Hardy, the loss of the Titanic was no frustrating result of combined human vanity and human
fragility before tremendous natural forces. Instead, it was Destiny, the realization of some
grandiose, divinely-conceived cosmic drama.
8.
In his poems addressing the appalling conditions of the child chimney sweeps in the 18th
century, William Blake skillfully manipulates poetic techniques such as imagery, juxtaposition,
and diction in order to poignantly convey the lives of these unfortunates. Common themes and
images between the two poems, perhaps with slightly different background stories, reiterate the
poet's feelings toward the minute laborers, and effectively evoke strong emotional responses
from the reader.
9.
In "Birthday Party," a wife in her late thirties hopes to surprise her husband with a glossy cake
as a symbol of her love. However, the husband reacts with embarrassment and anger. The
author, Katharine Brush, makes the reader feel disgusted by the man's heartlessness. Brush
asserts that these small gestures of affection are of the greatest importance, and represent a
potential heartbreak.
10. As individuals in an ever-growing, ever interconnected society, we are all at some point
simultaneously pursuing "that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which
questions." And as such, we tend to sympathize with characters in whom we see this same trait
reflected. Nick Carraway, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, is one such character
who realizes, after conforming with societies of all classes, that the "outward existence" led by
many does all but define "the inward life." His realizations of the transient, transparent, and
innate aspects of human nature are reflected in his inward questioning of his relationships with
Jay Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom Buchannan; and he understands, while conforming to their lifestyle,
the delusions they are themselves blind to.
11. Homer's Odyssey is regarded as perhaps the greatest epic poem of all time. Its intricate plot,
poetic imagery, and timelessness give modern authors ample opportunity to reinterpret its
content, sometimes in startlingly different ways. In the Odyssey, the narrator Odysseus portrays
the Sirens as possessing song that is so beautiful and tempting as to require heroic levels of
restraint. Margaret Atwood, however, uses tone, point of view, diction, and imagery to portray
the Sirens as down-to-earth and cynical creatures.
12. Looking strictly at the subject matter and structures of the poems by Wordsworth and Dunbar,
one would imagine they were carbon copies of each other. Both start with calls to visionaries of
the past, describe the present scenes of trouble, and then end with memories of the great qualities
of the two leaders. However, while the subject matter and even some of the imagery, the ocean
for example, link the two, the tone and style, and thus the meanings, of the two poems are
completely different.
13. In Seamus Heaney's poem "Blackberry-Picking", the use of juicy diction, clear and vivid
imagery, slant rhyme and conversational rhythm, along with casual form illustrate the poet's
message that the childhood experience of picking berries holds a deeper metaphor for life; that is,
childish hopes continue to exist despite the continual slap of reality.