This is what my professor wrote in the instructions:
I want to do it on the poem I mentioned above.
Close reading is the foundation of literary criticism. For this essay, you need to employ your close reading skills in the service of an argument you wish to make about one of the poems we are reading. Your purpose should be to improve your readers’ understanding of the work. Remember, however, that literary analysis is not the same as paraphrase or summary. How a literary work says what it says is as important as what it says. You must therefore explore the how of the work you have chosen, not just the what. You should assume your readers are familiar with the work. Therefore, you should never bother with summarizing any part of it.
Note that while the class as a whole may be discussing the work you are analyzing, I expect your essay to be both more narrowly focused and to offer further analysis than we may have had time for in class. However, you should certainly apply what you have learned about the author and his or her works in class to your analysis. You may not use secondary sources for this assignment. That means no research. I am not interested in your ability to look up what someone else thinks of a work. I am only interested in your ability to read discerningly and argue persuasively.
Utilize the elements of poetry in order to strengthen your argument: form, diction, mood/tone, rhyme, figurative language (imagery, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, symbolism, idiom, personification, alliteration, etc.), repetition, irony, voice/point of view, allegory, allusion, paradox, juxtaposition, etc.
Your thesis should unite theme and literary technique — something about what the work means and how it conveys what it means — in some way.
Requirements: Your close-reading should be 1-2 pages in length (no less than 1 full page), and double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, proper MLA heading, title, header and citations. You should include a Work(s) Cited page with a citation for the poem(s) you are writing about.
Choose any poem from the poetry section of our textbook (this should be the same poem that you chose for the Responding to Poetry Writing Practice assignment). If you want to argue that two poems are doing something very similar, and you wish to compare them to one another, you may do so. However, it can be difficult to provide enough substance on both poems with such a short length requirement. This is a more difficult task because your language will have to be that much more concise in order to cover both poems.
A successful close-reading paper will:
- Advance, support, and remain tightly focused on a single, arguable, unobvious claim.
- Focus on, and analyze, the language of the text.
- Include short quotes only insofar as they support or develop your claim.
- Make every word “tell.” Avoid fluff—vast generalizations, cosmic statements, book reports, unnecessary definitions, etc.
- Include in-text MLA citations and a Work(s) Cited page