Poetry Essay

Poetry Essay Assignment Options
Choose one of the following questions to answer. Answer the question in a full essay being careful to edit your
final paper to avoid sentence, spelling, word choice, agreement, and verb tense problems. Be sure to include
specific examples with author and page number using MLA . Refer to the essay guidelines in the fiction module
for general essay formatting.
Several of the short stories and poems we read concern death. Discuss one of those stories and compare the
way the short story treats death with the way a poem reveals death.
Choose a short story and a poem and compare the use of images in the two. You will need a thesis stating
whether the use of images is the same or different and what difference that use makes in the way the themes
are developed.
Choose two or three poems and compare the use of symbols. What are the symbols and what do they reveal
in each poem? This will be easier to do if they have the same topics.
Several of the poems we read use nature as a setting in which they can make a statement about an important
idea. Choose at least two poems. Explain the importance of nature as a setting in the poems: what does it
reveal?
Several of the poems we have read are concerned with decision making as are most of the short stories.
Compare the way decisions were made in one of the short stories with that in one of the poems. What do these
two genres tell us about decision making and how do they tell us? Be sure to include specific examples.
Compare the language (denotation, connotation, images, rhyme, etc.) of a poem with that in one of the short
stories. Why did each author choose the language? What does the language help us to understand about the
themes of the poem and story?