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How to Write the AP Lit Poetry Essay

What’s covered:.

How to Write the AP Literature Poetry Essay
Tips for Writing The AP Lit Poetry Essay

To strengthen your AP Literature Poetry Essay essay, make sure you prepare ahead of time by knowing how the test is structured, and how to prepare. In this post, we’ll cover the structure of the test and show you how you can write a great AP Literature Poetry Essay.

What is the AP Lit Poetry Essay?

The AP Literature exam has two sections. Section I contains 55 multiple choice questions, with 1 hour time allotted. This includes at least two prose fiction passages and two poetry passages.

Section II, on the other hand, is a free response section. Here, students write essays to 3 prompts. These prompts include a literary analysis of a poem, prose fiction, or in a work selected by the student. Because the AP Literature Exam is structured in a specific, predictable manner, it’s helpful to prepare yourself for the types of questions you’ll encounter on test day.

The Poetry Essay counts for one-third of the total essay section score, so it’s important to know how to approach this section. You’ll want to plan for about 40 minutes on this question, which is plenty of time to read and dissect the prompt, read and markup the poem, write a brief outline, and write a concise, well-thought out essay with a compelling analysis.

Tips for Writing the AP Lit Poetry Essay

1. focus on the process.

Writing is a process, and so is literary analysis. Think less about finding the right answer, or uncovering the correct meaning of the poem (there isn’t one, most of the time). Read the prompt over at least twice, asking yourself carefully what you need to look for as you read. Then, read the poem three times. Once, to get an overall sense of the poem. Second, start to get at nuance; circle anything that’s recurring, underline important language and diction , and note important images or metaphors. In your annotations, you want to think about figurative language , and poetic structure and form . Third, pay attention to subtle shifts in the poem: does the form break, is there an interruption of some sort? When analyzing poetry, it’s important to get a sense of the big picture first, and then zoom in on the details.

2. Craft a Compelling Thesis

No matter the prompt, you will always need to respond with a substantive thesis. A meaty thesis contains complexity rather than broad generalizations , and points to specifics in the poem.

By examining the colloquial language in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool”, we can see the tension of choosing to be “cool”. This raises important ideas about education, structure, and routine, and the consequences of living to be “real cool”.

Notice how the thesis provides a roadmap of what is to follow in the essay , and identifies key ideas that the essay will explore. It is specific, and not vague. The thesis provides a bigger picture of the text, while zooming in the colloquial language the speaker uses.

A good thesis points out the why as much as the what . Notice how in the above example, the thesis discusses language in the poem as it connects to a bigger message about the poem. For example, it’s not enough to discuss Emily Dickinson’s enjambment and hyphens. A good thesis will make a compelling argument about why those infamous Dickinson hyphens are so widely questioned and examined. Perhaps a good thesis might suggest that this unique literary device is more about self-examination and the lapse in our own judgement.

3. Use Textual Evidence

To support your thesis, always use textual evidence . When you are creating an outline, choose a handful of lines in the poem that will help illuminate your argument. Make sure each claim in your essay is followed by textual evidence, either in the form of a paraphrase, or direct quote . Then, explain exactly how the textual evidence supports your argument . Using this structure will help keep you on track as you write, so that your argument follows a clear narrative that a reader will be able to follow.

Your essay will need to contain both description of the poem, and analysis . Remember that your job isn’t to describe or paraphrase every aspect of the poem. You also need lots of rich analysis, so be sure to balance your writing by moving from explicit description to deeper analysis.

4. Strong Organization and Grammar

A great essay for the AP Literature Exam will contain an introduction with a thesis (not necessarily always the last sentence of the paragraph), body paragraphs that contain clear topic sentences, and a conclusion . Be sure to spend time thinking about your organization before you write the paper. Once you start writing, you only want to think about content. It’s helpful to write a quick outline before writing your essay.

There’s nothing worse than a strong argument with awkward sentences, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Make sure to proofread your work before submitting it. Carefully edit your work, paying attention to any run-on sentences, subject-verb agreement, commas, and spelling. You’d be surprised how many mistakes you’ll catch just by rereading your work.

Common Mistakes on the AP Literature Poetry Essay

It can be helpful to know what not to do when it comes time to prepare for the AP Literature Poetry Essay. Here are some common mistakes students make on the AP Literature Poetry Essay:

1. Thesis is not arguable and is too general

Your thesis should be arguable, and indicate the central ideas you will discuss in your essay. Read the prompt carefully and craft your thesis in light of what the prompt asks you to do. If the prompt mentions specific literary devices, find a way to tie those into your thesis. In your thesis, you want to connect to the meaning of the poem itself and what you feel the poet intended when using those particular literary devices.

2. Using vague, general statements rather than focusing on analysis of the poem

Always stay close to the text when writing the AP Literature Poetry Essay. Remember that your job is not to paraphrase but to analyze. Keep explicit descriptions of the poem concise, and spend the majority of your time writing strong analysis backed up by textual evidence.

3. Not using transitions to connect between paragraphs

Make sure it’s not jarring to the reader when you switch to a new idea in a new paragraph. Use transitions and strong topic sentences to seamlessly blend your ideas together into a cohesive essay that flows well and is easy to follow.

4. Textual evidence is lacking or not fully explained

Always include quotes from the text and reference specifics whenever you can. Introduce your quote briefly, and then explain how the quote connects back to the topic sentence after. Think about why the quotes connect back to the poet’s central ideas.

5. Not writing an outline

Of course, to write a fully developed essay you’ll need to spend a few minutes planning out your essay. Write a quick outline with a thesis, paragraph topics and a list of quotes that support your central ideas before getting started.

To improve your writing, take a look at these essay samples from the College Board, with scoring guidelines and commentary.

How Will AP Scores Affect My College Chances?

While you can self-report AP scores, they don’t really affect your admissions chances . Schools are more interested in how you performed in the actual class, as your grades impact your GPA. To understand how your GPA impacts your college chances, use our free chancing engine . We’ll let you know your personal chance of acceptance at over 1500 schools, plus give you tips for improving your profile.

How to Write a Good English Literature Essay

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

How do you write a good English Literature essay? Although to an extent this depends on the particular subject you’re writing about, and on the nature of the question your essay is attempting to answer, there are a few general guidelines for how to write a convincing essay – just as there are a few guidelines for writing well in any field.

We at Interesting Literature call them ‘guidelines’ because we hesitate to use the word ‘rules’, which seems too programmatic. And as the writing habits of successful authors demonstrate, there is no one way to become a good writer – of essays, novels, poems, or whatever it is you’re setting out to write. The French writer Colette liked to begin her writing day by picking the fleas off her cat.

Edith Sitwell, by all accounts, liked to lie in an open coffin before she began her day’s writing. Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk, claiming he needed the scent of their decay to help him write. (For most student essay-writers, such an aroma is probably allowed to arise in the writing-room more organically, over time.)

We will address our suggestions for successful essay-writing to the average student of English Literature, whether at university or school level. There are many ways to approach the task of essay-writing, and these are just a few pointers for how to write a better English essay – and some of these pointers may also work for other disciplines and subjects, too.

Of course, these guidelines are designed to be of interest to the non-essay-writer too – people who have an interest in the craft of writing in general. If this describes you, we hope you enjoy the list as well. Remember, though, everyone can find writing difficult: as Thomas Mann memorably put it, ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Nora Ephron was briefer: ‘I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.’ So, the guidelines for successful essay-writing:

1. Planning is important, but don’t spend too long perfecting a structure that might end up changing.

This may seem like odd advice to kick off with, but the truth is that different approaches work for different students and essayists. You need to find out which method works best for you.

It’s not a bad idea, regardless of whether you’re a big planner or not, to sketch out perhaps a few points on a sheet of paper before you start, but don’t be surprised if you end up moving away from it slightly – or considerably – when you start to write.

Often the most extensively planned essays are the most mechanistic and dull in execution, precisely because the writer has drawn up a plan and refused to deviate from it. What is a more valuable skill is to be able to sense when your argument may be starting to go off-topic, or your point is getting out of hand, as you write . (For help on this, see point 5 below.)

We might even say that when it comes to knowing how to write a good English Literature essay, practising is more important than planning.

2. Make room for close analysis of the text, or texts.

Whilst it’s true that some first-class or A-grade essays will be impressive without containing any close reading as such, most of the highest-scoring and most sophisticated essays tend to zoom in on the text and examine its language and imagery closely in the course of the argument. (Close reading of literary texts arises from theology and the analysis of holy scripture, but really became a ‘thing’ in literary criticism in the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and other influential essayists started to subject the poem or novel to close scrutiny.)

Close reading has two distinct advantages: it increases the specificity of your argument (so you can’t be so easily accused of generalising a point), and it improves your chances of pointing up something about the text which none of the other essays your marker is reading will have said. For instance, take In Memoriam (1850), which is a long Victorian poem by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson about his grief following the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in the early 1830s.

When answering a question about the representation of religious faith in Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam (1850), how might you write a particularly brilliant essay about this theme? Anyone can make a general point about the poet’s crisis of faith; but to look closely at the language used gives you the chance to show how the poet portrays this.

For instance, consider this stanza, which conveys the poet’s doubt:

A solid and perfectly competent essay might cite this stanza in support of the claim that Tennyson is finding it increasingly difficult to have faith in God (following the untimely and senseless death of his friend, Arthur Hallam). But there are several ways of then doing something more with it. For instance, you might get close to the poem’s imagery, and show how Tennyson conveys this idea, through the image of the ‘altar-stairs’ associated with religious worship and the idea of the stairs leading ‘thro’ darkness’ towards God.

In other words, Tennyson sees faith as a matter of groping through the darkness, trusting in God without having evidence that he is there. If you like, it’s a matter of ‘blind faith’. That would be a good reading. Now, here’s how to make a good English essay on this subject even better: one might look at how the word ‘falter’ – which encapsulates Tennyson’s stumbling faith – disperses into ‘falling’ and ‘altar’ in the succeeding lines. The word ‘falter’, we might say, itself falters or falls apart.

That is doing more than just interpreting the words: it’s being a highly careful reader of the poetry and showing how attentive to the language of the poetry you can be – all the while answering the question, about how the poem portrays the idea of faith. So, read and then reread the text you’re writing about – and be sensitive to such nuances of language and style.

The best way to become attuned to such nuances is revealed in point 5. We might summarise this point as follows: when it comes to knowing how to write a persuasive English Literature essay, it’s one thing to have a broad and overarching argument, but don’t be afraid to use the microscope as well as the telescope.

3. Provide several pieces of evidence where possible.

Many essays have a point to make and make it, tacking on a single piece of evidence from the text (or from beyond the text, e.g. a critical, historical, or biographical source) in the hope that this will be enough to make the point convincing.

‘State, quote, explain’ is the Holy Trinity of the Paragraph for many. What’s wrong with it? For one thing, this approach is too formulaic and basic for many arguments. Is one quotation enough to support a point? It’s often a matter of degree, and although one piece of evidence is better than none, two or three pieces will be even more persuasive.

After all, in a court of law a single eyewitness account won’t be enough to convict the accused of the crime, and even a confession from the accused would carry more weight if it comes supported by other, objective evidence (e.g. DNA, fingerprints, and so on).

Let’s go back to the example about Tennyson’s faith in his poem In Memoriam mentioned above. Perhaps you don’t find the end of the poem convincing – when the poet claims to have rediscovered his Christian faith and to have overcome his grief at the loss of his friend.

You can find examples from the end of the poem to suggest your reading of the poet’s insincerity may have validity, but looking at sources beyond the poem – e.g. a good edition of the text, which will contain biographical and critical information – may help you to find a clinching piece of evidence to support your reading.

And, sure enough, Tennyson is reported to have said of In Memoriam : ‘It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself.’ And there we have it: much more convincing than simply positing your reading of the poem with a few ambiguous quotations from the poem itself.

Of course, this rule also works in reverse: if you want to argue, for instance, that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is overwhelmingly inspired by the poet’s unhappy marriage to his first wife, then using a decent biographical source makes sense – but if you didn’t show evidence for this idea from the poem itself (see point 2), all you’ve got is a vague, general link between the poet’s life and his work.

Show how the poet’s marriage is reflected in the work, e.g. through men and women’s relationships throughout the poem being shown as empty, soulless, and unhappy. In other words, when setting out to write a good English essay about any text, don’t be afraid to pile on the evidence – though be sensible, a handful of quotations or examples should be more than enough to make your point convincing.

4. Avoid tentative or speculative phrasing.

Many essays tend to suffer from the above problem of a lack of evidence, so the point fails to convince. This has a knock-on effect: often the student making the point doesn’t sound especially convinced by it either. This leaks out in the telling use of, and reliance on, certain uncertain phrases: ‘Tennyson might have’ or ‘perhaps Harper Lee wrote this to portray’ or ‘it can be argued that’.

An English university professor used to write in the margins of an essay which used this last phrase, ‘What can’t be argued?’

This is a fair criticism: anything can be argued (badly), but it depends on what evidence you can bring to bear on it (point 3) as to whether it will be a persuasive argument. (Arguing that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a Martian who came down to Earth and ingratiated himself with the world of Elizabethan theatre is a theory that can be argued, though few would take it seriously. We wish we could say ‘none’, but that’s a story for another day.)

Many essay-writers, because they’re aware that texts are often open-ended and invite multiple interpretations (as almost all great works of literature invariably do), think that writing ‘it can be argued’ acknowledges the text’s rich layering of meaning and is therefore valid.

Whilst this is certainly a fact – texts are open-ended and can be read in wildly different ways – the phrase ‘it can be argued’ is best used sparingly if at all. It should be taken as true that your interpretation is, at bottom, probably unprovable. What would it mean to ‘prove’ a reading as correct, anyway? Because you found evidence that the author intended the same thing as you’ve argued of their text? Tennyson wrote in a letter, ‘I wrote In Memoriam because…’?

But the author might have lied about it (e.g. in an attempt to dissuade people from looking too much into their private life), or they might have changed their mind (to go back to the example of The Waste Land : T. S. Eliot championed the idea of poetic impersonality in an essay of 1919, but years later he described The Waste Land as ‘only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’ – hardly impersonal, then).

Texts – and their writers – can often be contradictory, or cagey about their meaning. But we as critics have to act responsibly when writing about literary texts in any good English essay or exam answer. We need to argue honestly, and sincerely – and not use what Wikipedia calls ‘weasel words’ or hedging expressions.

So, if nothing is utterly provable, all that remains is to make the strongest possible case you can with the evidence available. You do this, not only through marshalling the evidence in an effective way, but by writing in a confident voice when making your case. Fundamentally, ‘There is evidence to suggest that’ says more or less the same thing as ‘It can be argued’, but it foregrounds the evidence rather than the argument, so is preferable as a phrase.

This point might be summarised by saying: the best way to write a good English Literature essay is to be honest about the reading you’re putting forward, so you can be confident in your interpretation and use clear, bold language. (‘Bold’ is good, but don’t get too cocky, of course…)

5. Read the work of other critics.

This might be viewed as the Holy Grail of good essay-writing tips, since it is perhaps the single most effective way to improve your own writing. Even if you’re writing an essay as part of school coursework rather than a university degree, and don’t need to research other critics for your essay, it’s worth finding a good writer of literary criticism and reading their work. Why is this worth doing?

Published criticism has at least one thing in its favour, at least if it’s published by an academic press or has appeared in an academic journal, and that is that it’s most probably been peer-reviewed, meaning that other academics have read it, closely studied its argument, checked it for errors or inaccuracies, and helped to ensure that it is expressed in a fluent, clear, and effective way.

If you’re serious about finding out how to write a better English essay, then you need to study how successful writers in the genre do it. And essay-writing is a genre, the same as novel-writing or poetry. But why will reading criticism help you? Because the critics you read can show you how to do all of the above: how to present a close reading of a poem, how to advance an argument that is not speculative or tentative yet not over-confident, how to use evidence from the text to make your argument more persuasive.

And, the more you read of other critics – a page a night, say, over a few months – the better you’ll get. It’s like textual osmosis: a little bit of their style will rub off on you, and every writer learns by the examples of other writers.

As T. S. Eliot himself said, ‘The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.’ Don’t get precious about your own distinctive writing style and become afraid you’ll lose it. You can’t gain a truly original style before you’ve looked at other people’s and worked out what you like and what you can ‘steal’ for your own ends.

We say ‘steal’, but this is not the same as saying that plagiarism is okay, of course. But consider this example. You read an accessible book on Shakespeare’s language and the author makes a point about rhymes in Shakespeare. When you’re working on your essay on the poetry of Christina Rossetti, you notice a similar use of rhyme, and remember the point made by the Shakespeare critic.

This is not plagiarising a point but applying it independently to another writer. It shows independent interpretive skills and an ability to understand and apply what you have read. This is another of the advantages of reading critics, so this would be our final piece of advice for learning how to write a good English essay: find a critic whose style you like, and study their craft.

If you’re looking for suggestions, we can recommend a few favourites: Christopher Ricks, whose The Force of Poetry is a tour de force; Jonathan Bate, whose The Genius of Shakespeare , although written for a general rather than academic audience, is written by a leading Shakespeare scholar and academic; and Helen Gardner, whose The Art of T. S. Eliot , whilst dated (it came out in 1949), is a wonderfully lucid and articulate analysis of Eliot’s poetry.

James Wood’s How Fiction Works is also a fine example of lucid prose and how to close-read literary texts. Doubtless readers of Interesting Literature will have their own favourites to suggest in the comments, so do check those out, as these are just three personal favourites. What’s your favourite work of literary scholarship/criticism? Suggestions please.

Much of all this may strike you as common sense, but even the most commonsensical advice can go out of your mind when you have a piece of coursework to write, or an exam to revise for. We hope these suggestions help to remind you of some of the key tenets of good essay-writing practice – though remember, these aren’t so much commandments as recommendations. No one can ‘tell’ you how to write a good English Literature essay as such.

But it can be learned. And remember, be interesting – find the things in the poems or plays or novels which really ignite your enthusiasm. As John Mortimer said, ‘The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.’

Finally, good luck – and happy writing!

And if you enjoyed these tips for how to write a persuasive English essay, check out our advice for how to remember things for exams and our tips for becoming a better close reader of poetry .

30 thoughts on “How to Write a Good English Literature Essay”

You must have taken AP Literature. I’m always saying these same points to my students.

I also think a crucial part of excellent essay writing that too many students do not realize is that not every point or interpretation needs to be addressed. When offered the chance to write your interpretation of a work of literature, it is important to note that there of course are many but your essay should choose one and focus evidence on this one view rather than attempting to include all views and evidence to back up each view.

Reblogged this on SocioTech'nowledge .

Not a bad effort…not at all! (Did you intend “subject” instead of “object” in numbered paragraph two, line seven?”

Oops! I did indeed – many thanks for spotting. Duly corrected ;)

That’s what comes of writing about philosophy and the subject/object for another post at the same time!

Reblogged this on Scribing English .

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Great post on essay writing! I’ve shared a post about this and about the blog site in general which you can look at here: http://writeoutloudblog.com/2015/01/13/recommended-resource-interesting-literature-com-how-to-write-an-essay/

All of these are very good points – especially I like 2 and 5. I’d like to read the essay on the Martian who wrote Shakespeare’s plays).

Reblogged this on Uniqely Mustered and commented: Dedicate this to all upcoming writers and lovers of Writing!

I shall take this as my New Year boost in Writing Essays. Please try to visit often for corrections,advise and criticisms.

Reblogged this on Blue Banana Bread .

Reblogged this on worldsinthenet .

All very good points, but numbers 2 and 4 are especially interesting.

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Great post. Interesting infographic how to write an argumentative essay http://www.essay-profy.com/blog/how-to-write-an-essay-writing-an-argumentative-essay/

Reblogged this on DISTINCT CHARACTER and commented: Good Tips

Reblogged this on quirkywritingcorner and commented: This could be applied to novel or short story writing as well.

Reblogged this on rosetech67 and commented: Useful, albeit maybe a bit late for me :-)

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How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

Who is telling the story?
How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Ad hominem fallacy
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Appeal to authority fallacy
False cause fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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Dec 23, 2020
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CSEC English B: A Guide to Writing Poetry Essays

Updated: Jun 1, 2021

If you're reading this, chances are, you've been subjected to the unfortunate torture that is the English B (comparative) poetry essay. That's right- you've been allotted around 30 minutes to write on two of the twenty poems CSEC prescribed for your study over two years. Fun , right?

All jokes aside, we're all going to face a poetry essay at some point or another, whether practice assigned at school or the 'real McCoy' on the exam.

Writing poetry essays can seem daunting though- you're presented with a three part question demanding that you satisfy all necessary requirements to attain your maximum 25 marks. And on top of that, no matter how hard you try to clear your mind, it can be very difficult to arrange your thoughts well enough to put together an essay that can convince your teacher that you deserve at least a passing grade.

Well, worry no more! One of the main reasons we make silly slip-ups in our essays is because we don't necessarily know what it means to write a sufficient essay, and therefore don't have a small plan in our minds to which we can abide calmly during those nerve-wracking minutes. Hopefully after giving this guide a quick read, you'll understand more about how to tackle a question, the parts of an essay, what you want to try to achieve in each of those parts, and making an essay that stands out .

Step 1: The question

Poetry essay questions come in two varieties :

1) One where the poems you are to write on are named, for example:

“The poems ‘A Stone’s Throw’ and ‘The Woman Speaks to the Man Who has Employed her Son’ are about how women are treated.” For EACH poem:

(a) Briefly describe what is taking place.

(b) Discuss the speaker’s attitude to the woman.

2) One where the poems you are to write on are unnamed, and you are to choose two poems from the syllabus that fit a certain theme provided by the question. For example:

Choose TWO poems which you have studied that focus on a significant experience or event. For EACH poem:

(a) Describe the experience or event.

(b) Discuss the speaker’s attitude to this experience or event.

(Both questions are taken from the January 2013 English B Paper 2)

In every CSEC poetry question you get, parts one and two of the question will ask you to describe, discuss or explain some aspect of the poem. The third part of the question will always ask you to discuss a poetic/literary device used in the poem.

I know that this may be repetitive to you, but you should always read both questions through very carefully. It would be very unpleasant to begin writing on a question only to glance back at the paper and realize that you mistook a crucial detail , or even worse- that you can't fully answer the question you chose (this only applies to the actual exam, where you will choose between the two types of questions).

The question literally gives you the instructions for your essay, so they should not be overlooked .

Apart from ensuring that you don't mistake any details, reading the question also gives you the time to plan your essay mentally. The first sentence of the question will give you a guide as to what the theme of your essay will be, and what information you will include in the introductory paragraph. The instant that you read the question, you will be able to think about answers to each of the three parts of the question on which you will expound throughout the essay.

Step 2: The Introductory Paragraph (5 sentences)

Depending on the type of writer you are, you may prefer to write a separate plan for your essay before beginning writing. If you believe that you write better and more efficiently after planning out your essay, then, by all means, do your prior planning. A little time spent before arranging your thoughts is worth it, if it helps you.

A good plan can take the form of a few bullet points written loosely on a sheet of paper, where you note key concepts surrounding each of the parts of the question. For example, planning a first body paragraph for the question on the treatment of women could look like this:

a) A Stone's Throw - the woman in question is being abused in the name of justice by a group of ravenous men, who want to punish her for alleged promiscuity

The Woman Speaks to the Man who Has Employed Her Son - the mother, despite having cared for her son and placing no limits on his potential, has to accept being betrayed by this very son, who now seeks a father figure in a man offering him work as part of a gang

Those are brief summaries, and it would be expected that you go into more detail within the body paragraph.

While some may prefer to plan their essays, others (such as myself) prefer to just jump right into the essay and keep themselves in check while writing.

The introductory paragraph is a very important start, and can even help you in planning the essay overall. Let us first consider the parts of the introductory paragraph of a poetry essay:

As shown above, the introductory paragraph of a poetry essay will contain five basic parts: the hook, stating poems, and question parts 1, 2 and 3.

The Hook is one of the best ways to make your essay stand out. It is a statement that should be based on the theme of the question chosen. So, for question 1 from the past paper, the theme would be the treatment of women . Question 2's theme would be significance experience or events .

Making an interesting general statement can seem very difficult at first, but it's really about either trying to 'sound smart' or expressing your thoughts on the theme (just make sure that you don't use any personal pronouns like 'I' and 'we.' For example, look at the following hooks based on question 2:

"Each unique experience, whether triggered by disruptive forces such as nature, contextual obligation and temporal necessity influence momentary revelations described in most of the poems prescribed by the CSEC syllabus."

(Note that although the hook is important for distinguishing your essay, you should not take too long to write it, since you still have 4 and a half paragraphs to write afterwards.)

After the hook, you must state the poems you have chosen (or the poems provided by the question) in a sentence that also compares the two. Maybe a bit complicated? Look at the following example for question 2:

"The poems “South” by Kamau Brathwaite and “An African Thunderstorm” by David Rubadiri both include vivid descriptions of significant experiences in the life of each speaker."

See? In this sentence, you just want to mention both of the poems you will be comparing. It connects what you said in your hook to the rest of the essay.

Question Parts 1, 2 and 3 simply involve you summarizing how you will answer each part of the question in the rest of the essay. Maybe in previous grades, you've heard of the thesis statement, where teachers would expect a simple sentence like "this essay will..." and then you would restate the question.

However, at this higher level of writing (yes, you are at a higher academic level now, yay), teachers want something a little less... bland.

For each part of the question, it is suggested that you write at least one sentence outlining your answer (in relation to BOTH poems). So, part 1 of question 2 asks you to "Describe the experience or event." So, your sentence would give a brief description of the experience or event in both poems you chose (in this case, we chose "South" and "An African Thunderstorm"):

"Brathwaite illustrates the incident of migration in “South” through a homesick islander while Rubadiri presents a more concrete experience of the destructive force of nature (a thunderstorm) through a member of an African village."

(Using the last names of the poets can be a good way to refer to the poems during comparisons)

Notice that only a few words are used to describe the experience in each poem, since you are only summarizing what you will discuss in a whole paragraph later.

Comparing the poems like that in the sentence can be useful when you want to write efficient sentences.

The same thing is done for question parts 2 and 3:

"The persona of “South” is averse to his new surroundings after leaving his homeland, and feels oppressed by a strange and cold environment , while the speaker of “An African Thunderstorm” along with the members of his village react with fear towards the cloud of impending doom. "

"Brathwaite employs personification to convey the impact of migration on the persona. Rubadiri uses repetition to communicate the effect of the experience of the thunderstorm."

Aaaand just like that, you've completed your introductory paragraph! The best thing about introductory paragraphs like this is that they help you plan and think about the answers to all the questions before actually expounding on each point. Let's look at the combined introductory paragraph:

"The length of the average human’s lifetime encompasses the interwoven intricacies of several experiences which influence the internal mindscape of the person in question as well as those around them. Each unique experience, whether triggered by disruptive forces such as nature, contextual obligation and temporal necessity influence momentary revelations described in most of the poems prescribed by the CSEC syllabus. The poems “South” by Kamau Brathwaite and “An African Thunderstorm” by David Rubadiri both include vivid descriptions of significant experiences in the life of each speaker. Brathwaite illustrates the incident of migration in “South” through a homesick islander while Rubadiri presents a more concrete experience of the destructive force of nature (a thunderstorm) through a member of an African village. The persona of “South” is averse to his new surroundings after leaving his homeland, and feels oppressed by a strange and cold environment, while the speaker of “An African Thunderstorm” along with the members of his village react with fear towards the cloud of impending doom. Brathwaite employs personification to convey the impact of migration on the persona. Rubadiri uses repetition to communicate the effect of the experience of the thunderstorm."

Step 3: The Body Paragraphs

You are probably already familiar with the three parts of a paragraph: the topic sentence, body sentences and the concluding sentence. However, in a poetry essay, you are comparing two poems, and you are doing that while answering a question in 3 parts. As a result, your paragraphs may be a bit different.

Instead of that model, it may be useful to think of each paragraph as composed of different chunks of points, examples and explanations for each poem. I like to think of each paragraph as containing two paragraphs within it, a separate topic sentence for each poem :

Overall Topic Sentence (Optional)- This sentence gives a general overview of both poems. This is optional though, as it is more efficient to simply start with the topic sentence for the first poem.

Look at the following examples for parts 1 and 2 (an overall topic sentence is not very applicable to question part 3 ):

Part 1: "The poems both investigate very distinctive experiences in the lives of the personas, each one important to the speaker in conflicting ways."

Part 2: "Each persona finds himself in the midst of a strange and somewhat threatening circumstance, and their own reactions as well as those of the people around them reflect the severity of what is occurring."

Poem Topic Sentences

The poem topic sentence should be a specific connection of the poem to the question, and can be similar to what was written in the introductory paragraph. Each poem topic sentence should be the start of what you will write on that particular poem, so your body paragraph will be like two paragraphs in one.

For example, for question 2 part 1, the topic sentences for the two poems selected could be:

"Firstly, the persona of “South” explores the experience of migration and the impact of abandoning his homeland."

"On the other hand, the persona of “An African Thunderstorm” finds himself and his village threatened by an immensely powerful thunderstorm. The poem explores this terrifying experience by relating in evocative detail the destructive power of the storm."

Note: Using comparative phrases such as 'on the other hand,' 'contrarily,' 'by comparison,' and 'similar to' can help to better connect the content of your essay.

The topic sentences are only meant to introduce the content (body sentences) of your paragraph, so your description of South would follow the topic sentence concerning South, and the same would go for An African Thunderstorm.

Body Sentences (Point, Example, Explanation)

The body sentences of your paragraphs are where you get to contribute the real content of your essay. When writing your body sentences, you should try to follow the structure Point, Example, Explanation, abbreviated as P.E.E., (if you're into that, I guess you can remember it like that).

Point- This is where you state an aspect of your answer to the question. So, for part 1, you would 'describe the event or experience.'

Example- Use an example (a quote) from the poem to support your point.

Explanation- Explain your point more and show how your example supports your point.

These three parts can be in three separate sentences, in one sentence, or even just two. You can even mix up the order of the parts to how you see fit. How much you write is fully dependent on w hat you find sufficient for answering the question.

Look at the following example of a completed body paragraph (the body sentences are underlined and colour-coded, red for point , blue for example and green for explanation ):

"Firstly, the persona of “South” explores the experience of migration and the impact of abandoning his homeland. The speaker leaves his island home, a picturesque landscape of shimmering ocean waves and sand , as shown in “ I have travelled: moved far from the beaches.” He has gone to “ stoniest cities,” towns of stony foundations and even stonier people, contrary to the warm people he remembers from his home. The northern lands he traversed were plagued with unpleasant weather conditions, like “ slanting sleet and… hail.” Travelling to the “ saltless savannas” of Africa, he noticed they were completely devoid of the salty ocean of his homeland which he misses so dearly. Now, he lives in a house amongst the trees in the forest “where the shadows oppress [him]" and the darkness around him reflects the longing for his island home. In the forest, there is only the rain and the river, which, to him, can never substitute for the boundless opportunity and joy of the sea. Leaving his home has brought him to several places in the northern world; each a stark contrast to the one place he feels he belongs. Now, he settles in a place that lacks the ocean and its distinct character, and the “tepid taste of the river” cannot satisfy him in its ordinary and saltless nature. On the other hand, the persona of “ An African Thunderstorm” finds himself and his village threatened by an immensely powerful thunderstorm. The poem explores this terrifying experience by relating in evocative detail the destructive power of the storm. The clouds are said to “ come hurrying with the wind,” denoting the speed with which the winds propel them towards the settlement. “ Like a madman chasing nothing,” the wind darts and turns, whirling about with no definite direction or purpose, bound to cause damage to the things around it. The persona sees the wind tossing things up as it moves by at breakneck speeds, carrying the “ pregnant clouds” (filled with rain and other hallmarks of meteorological terror) on its back. The “trees bend to let [the wind] pass” as it whistles by, showing the sheer force of its movement- even forcing the strong, tall-standing trees to bend as though prostrating themselves before the wind’s undeniable power. Around the persona in the village, the wind sends the clothes of the people flying off, waving in the wind like “ tattered flags.” Blinding flashes of lightning strike in the distance followed by the low rumble of thunder, a chaotic image of the imminent tempest. The “ pelting march of the storm” is continuous and seemingly unstoppable as it approaches the village, communicating the idea of doom associated with this experience."

Note that in the paragraph above,a separate sentence explanation is not as necessary since you are simply describing the poems.

Step 4: Concluding Paragraph

Sometimes, writing a concluding paragraph can seem like the most difficult part, because you don't have a clear path as to what to write . In these cases, for the sake of efficiency, you can think of the concluding paragraph as having 4 parts:

General Statement on the Theme or the Poems- This can be similar to your hook

Summary Sentence of Body Paragraph 1

Summary Sentence of Body Paragraph 2

Summary Sentence of Body Paragraph 3

For example:

"In conclusion, experiences define both the premise and particularities of human life. Distinct significant events create both momentary and long-lasting impacts to the person in question as well as those around them. The poems “South” and “An African Thunderstorm” both present a significant experience in the lives of the personas. While the speaker’s reaction to migration in “South” is in phases, beginning with a denial of oppressive memory followed by acceptance, the people around the speaker in “An African Thunderstorm” react with both fear and seemingly malapropos joy to the imminent thunderstorm. Brathwaite implements personification to relay the impact of external migration on the persona. Rubadiri employs repetition to convey the thunderstorm’s impact on the environment, and therefore rationalizes the fear of the members of the village."

(Starting with "In conclusion" is very common, so you can usually omit such clichéd connectors)

Now, let's take a look at the completed essay:

The length of the average human’s lifetime encompasses the interwoven intricacies of several experiences which influence the internal mindscape of the person in question as well as those around them. Each unique experience, whether triggered by disruptive forces such as nature, contextual obligation and temporal necessity influence momentary revelations described in most of the poems prescribed by the CSEC syllabus. The poems “South” by Kamau Brathwaite and “An African Thunderstorm” by David Rubadiri both include vivid descriptions of significant experiences in the life of each speaker. Brathwaite illustrates the incident of migration in “South” through a homesick islander while Rubadiri presents a more concrete experience of the destructive force of nature (a thunderstorm) through a member of an African village. The persona of “South” is averse to his new surroundings after leaving his homeland, and feels oppressed by a strange and cold environment, while the speaker of “An African Thunderstorm” along with the members of his village react with fear towards the cloud of impending doom. Brathwaite employs personification to convey the impact of migration on the persona. Rubadiri uses repetition to communicate the effect of the experience of the thunderstorm.

Firstly, the persona of “South” explores the experience of migration and the impact of abandoning his homeland. The speaker leaves his island home, a picturesque landscape of shimmering ocean waves and sand, as shown in “ I have travelled: moved far from the beaches.” He has gone to “ stoniest cities,” towns of stony foundations and even stonier people, contrary to the warm people he remembers from his home. The northern lands he traversed were plagued with unpleasant weather conditions, like “ slanting sleet and… hail.” Travelling to the “ saltless savannas” of Africa, he noticed they were completely devoid of the salty ocean of his homeland which he misses so dearly. Now, he lives in a house amongst the trees in the forest “where the shadows oppress [him]" and the darkness around him reflects the longing for his island home. In the forest, there is only the rain and the river, which, to him, can never substitute for the boundless opportunity and joy of the sea. Leaving his home has brought him to several places in the northern world; each a stark contrast to the one place he feels he belongs. Now, he settles in a place that lacks the ocean and its distinct character, and the “tepid taste of the river” cannot satisfy him in its ordinary and saltless nature. On the other hand, the persona of “ An African Thunderstorm” finds himself and his village threatened by an immensely powerful thunderstorm. The poem explores this terrifying experience by relating in evocative detail the destructive power of the storm. The clouds are said to “ come hurrying with the wind,” denoting the speed with which the winds propel them towards the settlement. “ Like a madman chasing nothing,” the wind darts and turns, whirling about with no definite direction or purpose, bound to cause damage to the things around it. The persona sees the wind tossing things up as it moves by at breakneck speeds, carrying the “ pregnant clouds” (filled with rain and other hallmarks of meteorological terror) on its back. The “trees bend to let [the wind] pass” as it whistles by, showing the sheer force of its movement- even forcing the strong, tall-standing trees to bend as though prostrating themselves before the wind’s undeniable power. Around the persona in the village, the wind sends the clothes of the people flying off, waving in the wind like “ tattered flags.” Blinding flashes of lightning strike in the distance followed by the low rumble of thunder, a chaotic image of the imminent tempest. The “ pelting march of the storm” is continuous and seemingly unstoppable as it approaches the village, communicating the idea of doom associated with this experience.

Each persona finds himself in the midst of a strange and somewhat threatening circumstance, and their own reactions as well as those of the people around them reflect the severity of what is occurring. In “South,” the persona’s reaction to migration can be divided into two distinct stages as related by the poem. His initial reaction is one in which he is ‘oppressed’ by the darkness of his surroundings and seems overtaken by an emotion of inextricable gloom. He is now in a place so unlike his island home, devoid of the ocean which he so loves and has lacked in all the places he has gone to since migrating. The only water he finds here is from the rain or the river, whose ‘tepid taste’ is unappealing and bland to him. In this initial reaction, he denies the river. He, who is “ born of the ocean,” cannot “ seek solace in rivers.” While the ocean has a characteristic ebb and flow, the river runs on ad infinitum, without end. Instead of representing limitless renewal like the ocean, the river instead flows on “like [his] longing” for his homeland. By denying the river, he also denies himself longing for home- even though it is the absence of things he cherishes and misses so dearly that creates his sense of gloom in the first place. His second reaction, shown in the volta of the poem, is when he accepts the river and decides to join it. The river, though constantly flowing like the persona’s longing, is both a conduit of humanity’s past events as well as a path to the sea. In accepting the river and in turn his longing, he also is able to tap into the historical archive of the river and recall his own childhood. Thus, the persona’s reaction is an abridged version of the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief- he begins with denial of the river and what it represents in reaction to being parted with his homeland, and ends with accepting its repertoire of past events (good and bad) to reminisce happily on visions from his childhood. He is able to return to the sea. On the other hand, the persona of “An African Thunderstorm” does not have a reaction illustrated by the poem to the experience of the thunderstorm. Instead, the poem focuses on the reactions of women and children in the village. The children are said to scream with delight in the ‘whirling wind,’ seemingly malapropos given the context of the destructive force of the storm. However, it makes sense as a puerile reaction to a novel experience. A child, not understanding the workings of the world as of yet, is most likely going to be delighted when confronted by something new, like strong winds or the beginnings of rain. The women and mothers of the village have a completely opposite reaction to the children. They instead “dart about… madly” showing a frenzied response to an obvious threat. They seem to be in a panic, either trying to complete preparations for the imminent storm, or, darting about aimlessly unsure of any way they can mitigate the its effects. The women’s babies are said to be “ clinging on their backs” reflecting a possible fear which they share with their mothers. The startling nature of the advent of something so undeniably malignant would be cause for babies to be fearful- and even if they were unable to comprehend it, they would be inheriting the evident fear displayed by their frantic mothers.

Finally, Brathwaite employs personification in “South” in order to convey the effect of migration on the persona. After migrating, the persona comes to live in a house in the forest. He specifically says “ the shadows oppress me,” giving the shadows a human-like quality in being able to abuse him in some way. The context of this line is based around his sojourns far away from the beaches of his home and now settling in a forest house. The shadows cast by trees in the canopy of a forest over the forest floor are likely what he refers to- so very different from the “ bright beaches” full of sunshine from his island home. However, he may also refer to shadows figuratively, and thus the line may take on a dual meaning. Shadows could also refer to recurrent memories of his home, in line with the common association of shadows with memories. So, having left the beaches he so dearly loves, he is stuck amidst the shadows of trees which only remind him of how far he has gone from where he belongs. The gloominess of this forest contradicts what he is used to, so it is as if he is being victimized by his own environment. In the same way, memories of his past, which only remind him of how incongruous the forest is to his island, subject him to constant longing and yearning for a return home. On the other hand, repetition is used in Rubadiri’s “An African Thunderstorm” to convey the impact of the experience of the thunderstorm on the environment. The line “trees bend to let it pass” is repeated twice throughout the poem and denotes the motion of the trees in relation to the wind. The trees lean and bend over when the wind passes by, shifting from its path due to its violence and strength. However, this also conveys a subservience in the trees in that they bend to allow the wind to pass. It is as though the trees are prostrating themselves before a powerful king as he strolls stately by. In the same way, the trees, tall and robust stalwarts of nature are bent forcefully by the mighty wind. Thus, the thunderstorm is shown to be immensely powerful, forcing everything around it to morph and change to accommodate its unhindered passage.

In conclusion, experiences define both the premise and particularities of human life. Distinct significant events create both momentary and long-lasting impacts to the person in question as well as those around them. The poems “South” and “An African Thunderstorm” both present a significant experience in the lives of the personas. While the speaker’s reaction to migration in “South” is in phases, beginning with a denial of oppressive memory followed by acceptance, the people around the speaker in “An African Thunderstorm” react with both fear and seemingly malapropos joy to the imminent thunderstorm. Brathwaite implements personification to relay the impact of external migration on the persona. Rubadiri employs repetition to convey the thunderstorm’s impact on the environment, and therefore rationalizes the fear of the members of the village.

AP® English Literature

How to get a 9 on poetry analysis frq in ap® english literature.

The Albert Team
Last Updated On: March 1, 2022

Are you taking the AP® English Literature and Composition exam? If you’re taking the course or self-studying, you know the exam is going to be tough. Of course, you want to do your best and score a five on the exam. To do well on the AP® English Literature and Composition exam, you’ll need to score high on the essays. For that, you’ll need to write a complete, efficient essay that argues an accurate interpretation of the work under examination in the Free Response Question section.

The AP® English Literature and Composition exam consists of two sections, the first being a 55-question multiple choice portion worth 45% of the total test grade. This section tests your ability to read drama, verse, or prose fiction excerpts and answer questions about them. The second section worth 55% of the total score requires essay responses to three questions, demonstrating your ability to analyze literary works: a poem analysis, a prose fiction passage analysis, and a concept, issue, or element analysis of a literary work.

From your course or review practices, you should know how to construct a clear, organized essay that defends a focused claim about the work under analysis. Your should structure your essay with a brief introduction that includes the thesis statement, followed by body paragraphs that further the thesis statement with detailed, well-discussed support, and a short concluding paragraph that reiterates and reinforces the thesis statement without repeating it. Clear organization, specific support, and full explanations or discussions are three critical components of high-scoring essays.

General Tips to Bettering Your Odds at a Nine on the AP® English Literature and Composition Exam.

Your teacher may have already told you how to approach the poetry analysis, but for the poetry essay, it’s important to keep the following in mind coming into the exam:

Carefully read, review, and underline key to-do’s in the prompt.
Briefly outline where you’re going to hit each prompt item–in other words, pencil out a specific order.
Be sure you have a clear thesis that includes the terms mentioned in the instructions, literary devices, tone, and meaning.
Include the author’s name and title of the poem in your thesis statement.
Use quotes—lots of them—to exemplify the elements throughout the essay.
Fully explain or discuss how your element examples support your thesis. A deeper, fuller, and focused explanation of fewer elements is better than a shallow discussion of more elements (shotgun approach).
Avoid vague, general statements for a clear focus on the poem itself.
Use transitions to connect sentences and paragraphs.
Write in the present tense with generally good grammar.
Keep your introduction and conclusion short, and don’t repeat your thesis verbatim in your conclusion.

The newly-released 2016 sample AP® English Literature and Composition exam questions, sample responses, and grading rubrics provide a valuable opportunity to analyze how to achieve high scores on each of the three Section II FRQ responses. However, for purposes of this examination, the Poetry Analysis strategies will be the focus. The poem for analysis in last year’s exam was “The Juggler” by Richard Wilbur, a modern American poet. Exam takers were asked to analyze the following:

how the speaker in the poem describes the juggler
what the description shows about the speaker
how the poet uses imagery, figurative language, and tone to convey meaning

When you analyze the components of an influential essay, it’s helpful to compare all three sample answers provided by the CollegeBoard: the high scoring (A) essay, the mid-range scoring (B) essay, and the low scoring (C) essay. All three provide a teaching opportunity for achieving a nine on the poetry analysis essay.

Start with a Succinct Introduction that Includes Your Thesis Statement

The first sample essay, the A essay, quickly and succinctly introduces the author, title, thesis, elements, and devices. The writer’s introduction sentences are efficient: they contain no waste and give the reader a sense of the cohesiveness of the argument, including the role of each of the analyzed components in proving the thesis. The specificity of the details in the introduction shows that the writer is in control, with phrases like “frequent alliteration,” “off-kilter rhyme”, and “diction evoking an almost spiritual level of power”. The writer leaves nothing to guesswork.

The mid-range B essay introduction also cites some specific details in the poem, like “visual imagery (of the juggler and his balls), figurative language (the personification of the balls interacting with the juggler), and tone (the playful mood of the first two stanza)”. However, the writer wastes space and precious time (five whole lines!) with a vague and banal recitation of the prompt. The mid-range answer also doesn’t give the reader an understanding of an overarching thesis that he or she will use the elements and devices to support, merely a reference to the speaker’s “attitude”.

The third sample lacks cohesiveness, a thesis statement, and organization. The sentences read like a shotgun spray of facts and descriptions that give no direction to the reader of the writer’s approach: how he or she will use the elements and details listed to prove a thesis. The short, choppy sentences don’t connect, and the upshot is something so commonplace as Wilbur describes a talented juggler, who is also a powerful teacher. That doesn’t respond to the prompt, which requires an argument about what the juggler’s description reveals about the speaker.

To sum up, make introductions brief and compact, using specific details from the poem and a clear direction that address the call of the prompt. Writing counts. Short, choppy, disconnected sentences make an incoherent, unclear paragraph. Don’t waste time on sentences that don’t do the work ahead for you. Cut to the chase; be specific.

Use Clear Examples to Support Your Argument Points

The A answer first supports the thesis by pointing out that alliteration and rhyme scheme depict the mood and disconnection of both the speaker and the crowd. The writer does this by noting how alliteration appears when the juggler performs, but not before. The student also notes how the mood and connection to the crowd cohere when the juggler juggles, the balls defying gravity and uplifting the crowd with the balls. Then, the writer wraps up the first point about description, devices, and elements by concluding that the unusual rhyme scheme echoes the unusual feat of juggling and controlling the mood of the crowd.

With a clear focus on attaching devices to individually quoted phrases and poem details, the student leads the reader through the first pass at proving the attitude of the poem’s speaker while commenting on possible meanings the tone, attitude, and devices suggest. Again, the student uses clear, logical, and precise quotes and references to the poem without wasting time on unsupported statements. Specific illustrations anchor each point.

For example, the student identifies the end rhyme as an unusual effect that mimics the unusual and gravity-defiant balls. Tying up the first paragraph, the student then goes on to thoroughly explain the connection between the cited rhyme scheme, the unique defiance of gravity, and the effect on the speaker. The organizational plan is as follows: point (assertion), illustration, and explanation.

The mid-range sample also cites specific details of the poem, such as the “sky-blue” juggler, a color that suggests playfulness, but then only concludes that euphony shows the speaker’s attitude toward the juggler without making that connection clear with an explanation. The writer simply concludes without proving that assertion. Without further explanation or exemplification, the author demonstrates no knowledge of the term “euphony”.

Sample C also alludes to the “sky-blue” juggler but doesn’t explain the significance. In fact, the writer makes a string of details from the poem appear significant without actually revealing anything about the details the writer notes. They’re merely a string of details.

Discussion is Crucial to Connect Your Quotes and Examples to Your Argument Points

Rather than merely noting quoted phrases and lines without explanation, the A response takes the time to thoroughly discuss the meaning of the quoted words, phrases, and sentences used to exemplify his or her assertions. For example, the second paragraph begins with an assertion that the speaker’s view of the world is evident through the diction used when describing the juggler and the juggler’s act. Immediately, the writer supplies proof by directing the reader to the first and last stanzas to find “lens,” “dusk”, and “daily dark”.

The selection of these particular diction choices demonstrates the writer’s knowledge of the term “diction” and how to support a conclusion the student will make by the end of the sentence that the speaker’s attitude toward the world around him is “not the brightest”. The writer gives a follow-up sentence to further convince the reader of the previous point about the speaker’s dim view by adding, “All the words and phrases used just fall flat, filled with connotations of dullness…”

Using the transition, “however”, the A response goes on to further explain that the juggler’s description contrasts with that of the speaker’s in its lightness, by again providing both specifically-quoted words and complete one or two full sentence follow-ups to the examples. In that way, the writer clarifies the connection between the examples and their use and meaning. Nothing is left unexplained–unlike the B response, which claims Wilbur uses personification, then gives a case of a quoted passage about the balls not being “lighthearted”.

After mentioning the term, the B essay writer merely concludes that Wilbur used personification without making the connection between “lighthearted” and personification. The writer might have written one additional sentence to show that balls as inanimate objects don’t have the emotions to be cheery nor lighthearted, only humans do. Thus, Wilbur personifies the balls. Likewise short of support, the writer concludes that the “life” of the balls through personification adds to the mystery and wonder–without further identifying the wonder or whose wonder and how that wonder results from the life of the balls.

Write a Brief Conclusion

While it’s more important to provide a substantive, organized, and clear argument throughout the body paragraphs than it is to conclude, a conclusion provides a satisfying rounding out of the essay and last opportunity to hammer home the content of the preceding paragraphs. If you run out of time for a conclusion because of the thorough preceding paragraphs, that is not as fatal to your score as not concluding or not concluding as robustly as the A essay sample (See the B essay conclusion).

The A response not only provides a quick but sturdy recap of all the points made throughout the body paragraphs (without repeating the thesis statement) but also reinforces those points by repeating them as the final parting remarks to the reader. The writer demonstrates not only the points made but the order of their appearance, which also showcases the overall structure of the essay.

Finally, a conclusion compositionally rounds out a gracious essay–polite because it considers the reader. You don’t want your reader to have to work hard to understand any part of your essay. By repeating recapped points, you help the reader pull the argument together and wrap up.

Write in Complete Sentences with Proper Punctuation and Compositional Skills

Though pressed for time, it’s important to write an essay with clear, correctly punctuated sentences and properly spelled words. Strong compositional skills create a favorable impression to the reader, like using appropriate transitions or signals (however, therefore) to tie sentences and paragraphs together, making the relationships between sentences clear (“also”–adding information, “however”–contrasting an idea in the preceding sentence).

Starting each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that previews the main idea or focus of the paragraph helps you the writer and the reader keep track of each part of your argument. Each section furthers your points on the way to convincing your reader of your argument. If one point is unclear, unfocused, or grammatically unintelligible, like a house of cards, the entire argument crumbles. Good compositional skills help you lay it all out orderly, clearly, and fully.

For example, the A response begins the first body paragraph with “In the first and last stanzas, no alliteration beyond ‘daily dark’ appears, evoking a tone that could hardly be described as cheerful”. The sentence, with grammatically-correct commas inserted to section off the lead-in phrase, “In the first and last stanzas,” as well as the dependent clause at the sentence’s end, “evoking a tone that…,” gives a road map to the reader as to the paragraph’s design: alliteration, tone, darkness. Then the writer hits all three of those with a complete explanation.

The next paragraph begins with a rather clunky, unwieldy sentence that nevertheless does the same as the first–keys the reader to the first point regarding the speaker’s view of the world and the devices and elements used to do so. It’s clear the writer tackles the speaker’s view, the juggler’s depiction, and diction choice–both as promised from the beginning in the thesis statement of the introductory paragraph and per the prompt. The writer uses the transition “In the first and last stanzas”, to tie the topic sentence to the examples he or she will use to prove the topic sentence; then the writer is off to do the same in the next paragraph.

So by the time the conclusion takes the reader home, the writer has done all of the following:

followed the prompt
followed the propounded thesis statement in exact order promised
provided a full discussion with examples
included quotes proving each assertion
used clear, grammatically correct sentences
wrote paragraphs ordered by a thesis statement
created topic sentences for each paragraph
ensured each topic sentence furthered the ideas presented in the thesis statement

Have a Plan and Follow it

It’s easier than it sounds. To get a 9 on the poetry analysis essay in the AP® Literature and Composition exam, practice planning a response under strict time deadlines. Write as many practice essays as you can. Follow the same procedure each time.

First, be sure to read the instructions carefully, highlighting the parts of the prompt you absolutely must cover. Then map out a scratch outline of the order you intend to cover each point in support of your argument. Try and include not only a clear thesis statement, written as a complete sentence but the topic sentences to each paragraph followed by the quotes and details you’ll use to support the topic sentences. Then follow your map faithfully.

Be sure to give yourself enough time to give your essay a brief re-read to catch mechanical errors, missing words, or necessary insertions to clarify an incomplete or unclear thought. With time, an organized approach, and plenty of practice, earning a nine on the poetry analysis is manageable. Be sure to ask your teacher or consult other resources, like albert.io’s Poetic Analysis practice essays, if you’re unsure how to identify poetic devices and elements in poetry, or need more practice writing a poetry analysis.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think. –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.” –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum , Dazed & Confused , and Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) · Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016) · Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) · Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Derek Walcott — A-Grade A-Level Literature Essay Example

One of my students completed this essay on Walcott recently for the CIE / Cambridge A-Level Literature Exam Board.

It received a borderline A grade (80%, 20/25) — there are some absolutely brilliant parts of it, and also some aspects which have room for improvement, so I’ve put my mark breakdown and suggestions for how to improve next time at the end of the exemplar too for you to read through. Hope it’s useful!

If you find this resource helpful, you can take a look at the full Walcott poetry course .

I have a lot of Derek Walcott’s poetry analysis, so be sure to check it out too by clicking this link .

THE QUESTION:

Walcott has said that the process of poetry is ‘one of excavation and of self-discovery’. How far do you see this process in his work? In your answer, you should refer in detail to three poems.

Much of Walcott’s poetry displays excavation and self-discovery through the exploration of themes such as nature, the environment and politics. By holding up a mirror to the issues surrounding these themes, Walcott arguably recreates the past and present as a form of excavation. Within his examination he is able to ignite an awareness for the reader, around the issues of slavery, post-colonialism and urbanisation. This awareness arguably awakens the reader to self-discovery, through being informed on the aforementioned issues. Likewise, by speaking of these issues, Walcott himself is also examining his own frustrations and expressing these views through his poetry.

With reference to the poem, ‘Ebb’, Walcott sets out to explore the theme of urbanisation and its harmful effects. The environment takes centre stage and is heavily prominent throughout each stanza. For instance, the first verse of the poem describes the endless cycle of how the earth is scorched and ‘fretted’ upon, how the earth resembles a ‘frayed hide’. The verb, ‘fretted’ refers to how the land has been tampered with and spoiled, and the adjective of ‘frayed’ shows the violent extent to which this has happened. Lastly, the noun, ‘hide’ is used as a metaphor for a heavily lashed animal hide. The use of this visual imagery effectively connotes how human greed disrespects nature. This is arguably because Walcott strongly believed that since the Caribbean islands left the federation and became independent islands like Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, and Walcott’s own native island, Saint Lucia in 1979, they all suffered a lack of unity among the Caribbean as a whole. In turn this led islands to be exploited for commercial greed. Another example of this can be found in the line, ‘rainbow-muck’, which again is a metaphor used to describe oil. Of all of the Caribbean Islands, Trinidad and Tobago is renowned for its copious oil supply, yet the island itself appears not to prosper from it. Rather, the wealth generated from it is passed directly into the pockets of other countries. Walcott further criticises the effects of urbanisation by portraying nature as victim with the image of an ‘oil-crippled gull’. Again ‘oil’ is used a symbol of urbanisation and greed, while the adjective of ‘crippled’ represents the damage caused. Through the use of powerful imagery denoting the destruction of nature, the reader is made to feel informed and aware of the issues raised.

In the poem ‘Veranda’ Walcott reconnects the reader to past and vividly turns his spotlight on the plight of slavery and colonialism, by vividly tying a link from past to present through language featuring ghosts and apparitions. From the second stanza a reference is made to slavery with ‘planters’ whose ‘tears’ are described as ‘marketable gum’. The noun, ‘tears’ laments the pain and suffering endured by the slaves to then be exploited as ‘marketable gum’ The noun, ‘gum’ is used as a triviality, something insignificant to be consumed by the masses, to then be spat out tasteless on the ground. This visual image strongly reflects the facelessness of greed and acknowledges the pain and toil to bring about such a triviality. Another ghost described is that of the ‘colonel’ whose heart is ‘hard’ as the ‘Commonwealth’s greenheart’. The colour ‘green’ with reference to the ‘greenheart’ could connote the colour of money and also represent envy for riches. Also the colonel himself, described as ‘hard’ is a fitting image of colonialism, for they enslaved the ‘planters’ without conscience. With this poem Walcott eerily describes the sins of history’s ugly past, presenting them as ghosts either in despair or still power-hungry. Walcott argued that British colonists took away Africa’s history and the colonisers themselves argued that they had no history before their presence there. This is why Walcott frequently opposes colonialism in his poetry, to raise awareness of the wrongs of the past and show that much African culture and history very much exists. Through painting a portrait of the past, Walcott arguably shows the reader the unflinching truth of what came before. This in-turn recreates the past and educates the reader on the former ills of slavery and colonialism.

With reference to the poem, ‘Parades, Parades, Walcott arguably demonstrates his use of excavation by hovering his lens over the theme of Caribbean politics. Consisting of two lengthy stanzas, the first, written in third-person, offers abstract imagery, such as a ‘wide desert’ that ‘no one marches’ and a vast ‘ocean’ of which ‘keels incise’. The adjective of ‘wide’ arguably paints an image of empty sparseness and the second person pronoun, ‘no one’ refers to loss of identity pertaining to the ills of post-colonialism. The verb, ‘marches’ could also symbolise a stagnant lack of progress for the Caribbean as a whole. The noun, ‘ocean’ refers to beautiful Caribbean beaches, only to then be ‘incise’(d) by the luxury liners filled with indulgent tourists. Walcott also cites the politicians who ‘plod’ devoid of ‘imagination’. Again, the active verb of ‘plod’ connotes the sluggish progress made to better the Caribbean and the abstract noun, ‘imagination’ paints the politician as dull and backward thinking. The second stanza then shifts tonally with a volta, and also to a first person plural, addressing the Caribbean locals, belonging to the parade. Walcott questions why they should have propaganda ‘drummed into their minds’ and why they should be made to feel ‘shy’ and ‘bewildered’. The stative verb of ‘drummed’ portrays the idea that people have been force-fed political ideas which do not hold their best interests in mind. The abstract noun ‘shy’ also connotes that they have been led astray and exploited. Walcott clearly demonstrates his ideas about ineffective politics by confronting the issues and in turn dismantling them in order to present them in a new light. This arguably informs the reader of the political injustice and also offers a sounding board for Walcott himself to air his frustrations.

While it could be argued that Walcott’s poetry doesn’t show evidence of the excavation process or self-discovery, owing to the sometimes abstract and esoteric manner in which he presents his work, there appears to be clear evidence pointing to the opposite. With the cynical and retrospective tone that seems to dominate his poetry, there appears to be compelling evidence that he is shedding light on the themes of politics, slavery and post-colonialism, by confronting the ills they caused, and in turn allowing the audience, and himself to re-discover the toil they have brought about.

GRADING (CIE Cambridge Mark Scheme)

Band 2 20/25 80% Borderline A Grade

Evidence of proficiency in selecting relevant knowledge to address the question with precise and integrated direct references to the text and supporting quotation. There may be evidence of awareness of the contexts in which the literary works studied were written and understood. U Evidence of intelligent understanding of ways in which writers’ choices of structure, form and language shape meanings, with analysis and appreciation of literary methods, effects and contexts.

P Evidence of personal response to the texts, relevant to the question, supported from the text, some originality of thought, straightforward and vigorously articulated, perhaps, rather than penetrating and subtle.

C Expression confident, with some complex ideas expressed with some fluency. Structure is sound. Literary arguments will be coherent, with progression of ideas through clearly linked paragraphs.

O Considers varying views and argues a case with support from the text. – This is the main one you’re lacking in, you don’t argue a case clearly or consider varying views .

HOW TO IMPROVE:

Make sure to address the question argumentatively or discursively (depending on the type of question) — rather than each paragraph is about a poem, make it about a point that answers the question, all linked together with a clear thesis
Alternative interpretations / critical theories — use these to develop your analysis further and achieve greater sensitivity of interpretation
Needs more specific, detailed use of contextual ideas
More structure/form points — good on language

Thanks for reading! If you found this resource helpful, you can take a look at the full Walcott poetry course .

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If you need help with “ write my UK essay ” for an English literature class, it can seem difficult, but with the right approach, it can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Whether you’re analyzing a novel, a play, or a collection of poems, the key is to understand the work deeply and convey your insights in a clear and compelling way. In this post, we’ll explore some practical tips and strategies to help you write a solid English literature essay.

Read and Understand the Work Thoroughly

The first and most crucial step is to read the literary work carefully and attentively, even if you’re considering using best essay writing services . Don’t just skim through it; take your time and immerse yourself in the text. Pay attention to the characters, plot, themes, symbols, and literary devices used by the author. Make notes, highlight passages, and jot down your initial thoughts and reactions.

Develop a Clear Thesis Statement

Every good essay needs a strong thesis statement. This is the central argument or claim that you’ll be making about the literary work. Your thesis should be specific, debatable, and supported by evidence from the text. Avoid making broad, vague statements; instead, strive for a focused and well-defined thesis that will guide your analysis.

Organize Your Ideas

Once you have a clear thesis statement, it’s time to organize your ideas. Create an outline that will serve as a roadmap for your essay. Decide on the main points you want to make and the evidence you’ll use to support them. Group related ideas together and arrange them in a logical order.

Introduce the Work and Your Thesis

Your introduction should grab the reader’s attention and provide some context about the literary work you’re analyzing. Give a brief summary of the plot or main themes, but avoid retelling the entire story. Then, clearly state your thesis statement and let the reader know what to expect from your essay.

Use Textual Evidence to Support Your Claims

In a literature essay, your arguments should be backed up by evidence from the text. Cite specific passages, quotes, or examples that illustrate your points. Don’t just summarize the plot; analyze and interpret the evidence to show how it supports your thesis.

Tip: When quoting from the text, be sure to properly introduce and integrate the quotes into your own writing.

Analyze Literary Devices and Techniques

Great literature is often rich in literary devices and techniques, such as symbolism, imagery, metaphor, and foreshadowing. Explore how the author uses these devices to convey deeper meanings and enhance the overall reading experience. Analyzing these elements can add depth and sophistication to your essay.

Consider Different Perspectives and Interpretations

While developing your analysis, it’s important to consider alternative perspectives and interpretations. Acknowledge counterarguments or differing viewpoints, and then explain why your interpretation is more compelling or valid. This shows that you’ve thought critically about the work and strengthened your own argument.

For example:

Some critics argue that the protagonist’s actions are driven by selfishness, but a closer examination of the text suggests that her motivations are more complex and rooted in a desire for personal growth.

Provide a Clear and Compelling Conclusion

Your conclusion should do more than simply restate your thesis; it should synthesize your main points and leave the reader with a lasting impression. Reflect on the broader implications or significance of your analysis, and consider how it contributes to a deeper understanding of the literary work or the human experience.

Key Takeaways:

Clearly restate your thesis
Summarize your main points
Explore the broader implications of your analysis
Leave the reader with a thought-provoking or insightful final statement

Edit and Proofread Carefully

Once you’ve finished your first draft, take a step back and review your essay with a critical eye. Check for clarity, coherence, and logical flow. Ensure that your arguments are well-supported and that your writing is free of grammatical errors, typos, and other technical issues.

Seek Feedback and Revise

Finally, don’t be afraid to seek feedback from others. Share your essay with a trusted friend, classmate, or instructor, and be open to constructive criticism. Use this feedback to refine and improve your essay before submitting it.

Writing a good English literature essay requires careful planning, deep analysis, and effective communication. By following these tips and strategies, you’ll be well on your way to producing a compelling and insightful essay that showcases your understanding of the literary work and your ability to engage with it critically.

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IBDP English A: Language & Literature

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Updated 4 April 2024

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HL Essay: Exemplar 4 (Szymborska Poetry)
Higher level essay
HLE sample work

When writing a Higher Level Essay on poetry, it"s hard to determine how many poems to use. One is clearly not enough, but it would be difficult, perhaps, to write about five different poems. So what is the sweet spot? For this student, it was three, and it feels like the right number given her line of inquiry about how narrative voice is used to compel readers to reflect about their own actions and behaviors.

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37 poetry collections to watch for in spring 2024

Social sharing.

April is Poetry Month so if you love poetry, watch for these books coming out in the first half of 2024.

Nucleus by Svetlana Ischenko

A book cover of colourful birds and flowers. A white woman with bangs in front of a city skyline by the water.

Nucleus is a poetry collection that explores the tensions between Svetlana Ischenko's two poetic cultures as a Ukrainian Canadian immigrant and multilingual poet. With both structured sonnets and lyrical pieces, the book examines the tensions of translating oneself as a new immigrant.

Nucleus is out now.

Born in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, Ischenko is a Vancouver-based poet, translator, former actress and teacher. She writes poetry, essays and plays in both English and Ukrainian. Her poems have been featured in The Antigonish Review and Event.

Once the Smudge is Lit by Kelsey Borgford and Cole Forrest, illustrated by Tessa Pizzale

A woman with blonde hair and beaded jewelry, a person with short brown hair and a moustache, a book cover with lit smudge in a bowl.

Once the Smudge is Lit offers readers insight into the spiritual elements of Ojibway culture and explores the contemporary Indigenous experience. The verse and evocative illustrations touch on various themes ranging from love to community.

Once the Smudge is Lit is out now.

Kelsey Borgford is a Nbisiing Nishnaabekwe from the Marten clan and an emerging author. She has a forthcoming children's book called What's in a Bead.

Cole Forrest is an Ojibway filmmaker and programmer from Nipissing First Nation. They are the writer and director of various short films that have been screened at festivals including imagineNATIVE, TQFF and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Indigenous directors explore pandemic life through short films in NFB online project

Tessa Pizzale is a Moose Cree artist and student at Nipissing University. She is based in North Bay, Ont.

Talking to Strangers by Rhea Tregebov

A book cover of the tips of two pairs of shoes -- converse and brown boots. A woamn with short grey hair wearing blue.

Talking to Strangers is a poetry collection that explores new encounters with people and objects. As is characteristic of celebrated poet Rhea Tregebov, the book dabbles in the art of recollection and elegy with skill and tenderness.

Talking to Strangers is out now.

Tregebov is a Vancouver-based poet, novelist and children's writer. She's written seven books of poetry and two novels, including Rue des Rosiers , and has won the J. I. Segal Award, the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Pat Lowther Award and the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award.

Hazard, Home by Christine Lowther

The author photo: a woman in front of a wooden bookshelf next to a lamp. She has long curly grey hair and freckles on her face. And the book cover: an illustration of a robin bird.

Hazard, Home is a collection of nature poetry with a decolonial lens. The work examines the world with wonder at the animals and plants — and grief due to urbanization, climate change and loss of biodiversity.

Hazard, Home is out now.

Read Environmental Services by Christine Lowther

Christine Lowther resides in ƛaʔuukwiiʔatḥ (Tla-o-qui-aht) territory on the west coast. She is the editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees and its youth companion volume. She is also the author of four poetry collections. She served as Tofino's Poet Laureate during the COVID years and was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize .

Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran

A composite of the author photo: an Asian woman with dark hair wearing a grey beads necklace and black top; and the book cover featuring an illustration of a sea shore

The poems in Precedented Parroting explore themes of loss, the natural world, Asian stereotypes and our feathered friends. It's also a book about survival through generations and how both loss and feathers can enable and necessitate flight.

Precedented Parroting is out now.

Born in New York City, Barbara Tran is a poet whose work has appeared in Women's Review of Books, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Honours include a MacDowell Colony Gerald Freund Fellowship, Pushcart Prize and Lannan Foundation Writing Residency. She was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize . She currently lives in Toronto.

Northerny by Dawn Macdonald

A book cover of a little shack and a shining moon. A woman with grey curly hair peeks out of a wooden cabin window.

Northerny tells of what it's like to grow up in the North — and the many ways in which the North can be messy, beautiful and painful. This poetry collection breaks free of the perception of the North as a way to enlightenment or escape and gives a Northerner's perspective of growing up and making a living in the region.

Northerny is out now.

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse and studied mathematics and physics at university. Her poetry has been published in The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada and The Malahat Review, among others. Northerny is her first book.

We Follow the River by Onjana Yawnghwe

An abstract book cover of two people in a green forest. An Asian woman with grey hair leans left against a pink background.

We Follow the River follows one family who escapes from military violence in Myanmar to Thailand and finally Canada. The collection is about learning about family history and finding a home in a foreign land.

We Follow the River is out now.

Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian writer who lives on the lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation in British Columbia. Her poetry books include Fragments, Desire and The Small Way, which were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Teeth by Dallas Hunt

A black book cover with an image of teeth made out of beads. A man wearing a black t-shirt and glasses crosses his tattooed arms.

Teeth is a poetry collection that explores the consequences of colonization and why it continues to repeat itself in today's society. The book also celebrates the successes of Indigenous peoples and looks into the realities they face.

Teeth is out now.

Dallas Hunt on Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. His children's book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock , illustrated by Amanda Strong, was nominated for several awards and was one of the 2024 CBC Kids Reads contenders . Hunt lives in Vancouver.

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin

A book cover with a nun on it. A white woman with blonde hair and glasses wearing a black beanie.

Gay Girl Prayers is a poetry collection that reclaims Catholic prayers and passages from the Bible to empower young women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. At once sassy and funny, this book celebrates cultural and societal differences.

Gay Girl Prayers is out now.

Why Emily Austin rewrote parts of the Bible through a queer and feminist lens

Emily Austin is an Ottawa-based writer. Her debut novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead , was longlisted for The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Ottawa Book Award.

A Blueprint for Survival by Kim Trainor

A book cover of a blueprint. A white woman with short hair in front of a bookcase.

A Blueprint for Survival is a poetry collection that starts in wildfire season and then explores the forms of resistance and survival in the context of climate change. It examines each of these forms as a blueprint for being in and seeing the world.

A Blueprint for Survival is out now.

Kim Trainor is the author of the poetry collections A thin fire runs through me , Karyotype and Ledi . Her poems have won the Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Prize, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and the Great Blue Heron Prize. Her poem Desolation made the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist . She lives in Vancouver.

Love Life Loss and a little bit of hope by Chief R. Stacey Laforme

A blue, pink and orange book cover. A man with grey/black hair wearing a beaded necklace.

In this poetry collection, Chief R. Stacey Laforme draws from his own experiences to share the moments and emotions that have shaped him. Intertwining pain and humour, it invites non-Indigenous people to explore Indigenous perspectives.

Love Life Loss and a little bit of hope is out now.

Laforme is the retired Chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation after serving his community for over 20 years. He is also a poet and storyteller, known for his collection Living in the Tall Grass: Poems of Reconciliation.

Medium by Johanna Skibsrud

A book cover of a person in a very pouffy dress in the wilderness. A black and white image of a woman with curly hair in a ponytail.

Medium is a poetry collection that gives voice to women vilified over the course of history including Helen of Troy, Shakuntala Devi and Marie Curie. The poems serve as a bridge through time and reimagine and reinterpret the myths as we know them.

Medium is out now.

Johanna Skibsrud has no faith in bestseller lists

Johanna Skibsrud is the Scotiabank Giller Prize -winning author of The Sentimentalists . She also wrote the novel Quartet for the End of Time and the short story collections Tiger, Tiger and This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories . She currently divides her time between Nova Scotia and Arizona.

impact statement by Jody Chan

An abstract white, blue and red book cover. An Asian person with a black bob and a septum piercing.

Using patient records, psychiatric assessments and court documents, impact statement tells the history of psychiatric institutions within the context of colonialism. The collection deals with themes of migration, intergenerational trauma, gentrification and racialized violence all while making space for a better future.

impact statement is out now.

Jody Chan is a Toronto-based writer, drummer, organizer and therapist. Their work includes haunt, all out futures and sick. They are the winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry .

you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

A woman with short brown hair. A woman with brown hair and glasses. A book cover of a blue-tinted rock.

you is a book-length poem that explores the formation of self and personal autonomy. Through verse and the spaces in between, the beautiful voice of the work reclaims and affirms one's life.

you is out now.

Chantal Neveu is a Montreal-based author of seven books of poetry. Her book This Radiant Life , also translated by Erín Moure won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation and the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize.

Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Her most recent book is Chus Pato's The Face of the Quartzes and her latest poetry book is Theophylline .

West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon

A composite of the book cover, a splash of green watercolour with the title and the portrait of the author: a Black man wearing a suit in front of cherry blossoms

West of West Indian is a poetry collection that explores the Queer Caribbean experience, both the pain and pleasure, as an individual and a collective. It dives into themes of love and autonomy using language that is often used to unsettle queer life.

West of West Indian is out now.

Linzey Corridon is a writer and educator. He was born in the Caribbean and he now lives in Canada.

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

A beige book cover. A man wearing a black shirt with white hair.

A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. Drawing on his personal experiences, this collection goes back in time to all the borders that he's crossed with imagery at once witty, moving and wise.

A Year of Last Things is out now.

Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian literary icon. His novels and poetry have earned international acclaim, and he was the first Canadian ever to win the Man Booker Prize — in 1992, for the wartime story The English Patient . Born in Sri Lanka and educated in England, Ondaatje moved to Canada when he was 18 to attend university.

For prize-winning poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, every book is an act of discovery

Ondaatje began his writing career in 1967 as a poet, winning two Governor General's Awards for poetry before turning to fiction. Over his career, he's won the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award and France's prestigious Prix Medicis among other prizes.

The Seventh Town of Ghosts by Faith Arkorful

A book cover of hand with oranges and leaves. A black and white photo of a Black woman with long dreadlocks wearing a grey crewneck.

The Seventh Town of Ghosts explores these titular towns through songs that help readers grapple with the challenges of existence and independence. The book offers insight into the power of connection, tenderness and the human spirit.

The Seventh Town of Ghosts is out now.

Read Family Affair by Faith Arkorful

Faith Arkorful has had her work published in Guts, Peach Mag, Prism International, Hobart, Without/pretend, The Puritan and Canthius, among others. She was a semi-finalist in the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize .

The Knot of My Tongue by Zehra Naqvi

An abstract book cover of a face and birds. A woman wearing a burgundy head covering against a leafy background.

The Knot of My Tongue uses a variety of poetic forms to capture a cast of characters as they attempt to express the inexpressible, from a new immigrant to Canada trying to speak a new language to the myth of Philomena searching for ways to communicate after her husband cuts off her tongue.

The Knot of My Tongue is out now.

Zehra Naqvi is a Vancouver-based writer who was born in Karachi. She won the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers . The Knot of My Tongue is her debut poetry collection.

shima by Shō Yamagushiku

A book cover of cartoon people carrying a bowl with smoke coming out of it. A man with a beard and long hair with a blurred city background.

shima is a poetry collection that questions both the past and future of a community exiled, anchored in the relationship of a father and son. It shows the fragility of memory with a voice at once yearning and precise.

shima is out now.

Shō Yamagushiku is a writer and researcher living in Victoria. shima is his debut poetry collection.

Oh Witness Dey! by Shani Mootoo

An abstract orange book cover with an eye. A black and white photo of a woman with glasses and short hair wearing a button-up.

With no record of how they got there and where they're originally from, Shani Mootoo's great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad by the British. Oh Witness Dey! discusses the concept of "origin" through an exploration of history, displacements and legacy, starting with her own.

Oh Witness Dey! is out now.

Shani Mootoo on chocolate, house chores and cryptic notes

Mootoo is a writer and visual artist who currently lives in Ontario. Her debut novel was 1997's Cereus Blooms at Night. Her novel Polar Vortex was shortlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize . Her other books include the novels Cane | Fire , Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab and Valmiki's Daughter. In 2022, she won the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award for fiction writers in the middle of their career .

Fine by Matt Rader

An abstract book cover of a person's legs and a lakeside view. A man with glasses and a short beard by a body of water.

Fine takes place in the Kelowna area from June 2021 to June 2022. The poetry collection deals with the events from that time period, including the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the November 2021 atmospheric river. Despite all these challenges, the poems present a voice of survival and an appreciation for the world's beauty.

When you can read it: April 2024

Rader is a writer from Kelowna, B.C. He is the author of six volumes of poetry, a book of nonfiction and the short story collection What I Want to Tell Goes Like This . He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

The Oneironaut ∅1 by Sheri-D Wilson

A black book cover with a blue astronaut. A woman with grey hair by the water.

The Oneironaut ∅1 is the first book-long epic poem in a trilogy that explores what the future would look like if we couldn't dream. In this speculative account, scientist Rain is drawn to a small group of people who protect the world of illusion and feels compelled to help them bring down the dystopian regime and allow people to dream once again.

'Let us speak differently about the world:' Poet says social change starts with language

Sheri-D Wilson is a Calgary-based writer and artist of 13 books, four short films and three words and music albums. She was appointed to The Order of Canada in 2019 and was the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Calgary from 2018-2020.

The Last to the Party by Chuqiao Yang

An abstract of a long exposed photo. An Asian woman with long black hair.

The Last to the Party is a poetry collection that deals with family, culture and diaspora through place and perspective — from a Saskatchewan childhood to family visits in Taiyuan. In this moving account, the speaker searches for moments of self-discovery and finds a strong poetic vision.

When you can read it: April 2, 2024

Chuqiao Yang is an Ottawa-based poet whose work has been featured in The Unpublished City, Ricepaper, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, Prism, Grain, CV2, Room, and on CBC Radio. Her chapbook, Reunions in the Year of Sheep, won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

The Lantern and the Night Moths by Yilin Wang

A book cover of a lantern and a moth. An Asian woman wearing glasses and a plaid shirt.

The Lantern and the Night Moths is a translation of poems by five contemporary and modern Chinese poets, Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi. The poems are translated next to their original text and the book includes essays about the art of poetry translation.

Yilin Wang is a writer, poet and Chinese-English translator. Her fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, CV2, carte blanche and The Tyee. They won the Foster Poetry Prize, an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada's National Magazine award and were longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize . She is based in Vancouver.

Terrarium by Matthew Walsh

A book cover with drawings of a house and a lake and grass. A black and white image of a white man leaning on his forearm wearing a beanie.

Terrarium is a poetry collection that explores queer identity and depression using a conversational writing style. Raw, confessional and often messy, the voice has a quality of intimacy and shared secrets.

Matthew Walsh is a poet known for their debut book These are not the potatoes of my youth , which was a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards . Walsh has previously contributed poetry to publications like The Malahat Review and Arc. They are now based in Toronto.

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins

A book cover of an eagle carrying another bird. A woman wearing a brown tank top and a pink skirt.

Sorry About the Fire is a debut poetry collection that sees the world through a triple lens of Irish, French and Odawa heritage. Using rhythmic language, it attempts to detect patterns and answer questions of time and being.

Colleen Coco Collins is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French and Odawa descent. Based in Nova Scotia, Sorry About the Fire is her first poetry collection.

Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe Undi

A book cover of two eggs balancing on top of one another at the edge of a table. A Black woman leans on her hand resting on a wooden table.

Scientific Marvel is a poetry collection that looks into the history of and current life in Winnipeg. With humour and surprise, it delves into deeper themes of racism, queerness and colonialism while keeping personal lived experiences close to the page.

The Poetry of Why: poet Chimwemwe Undi on a lifetime of questions in verse

Chimwemwe Undi is a Winnipeg-based poet, editor and lawyer. She is the Winnipeg Poet Laureate for 2023 and 2024. Undi was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize . She won the 2022 John Hirsch Emerging Writer Award from the Manitoba Book Awards and her work can be found in Brick, Border Crossings, Canadian Literature and BBC World, among others.

Midway by Kayla Czaga

A book cover of a ferris wheel near the water. A woman wearing a beanie and a plaid shirt.

Midway is a poetry collection that explores the writer's grief in the aftermath of her parents' deaths. The poems travel from the underworld to London's Tate Modern in a way that's both comforting and disconcerting.

Kayla Czaga is also the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On and Dunk Tank . Her debut won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, among others. Czaga was on the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Drunk River . She lives in Victoria and served as the online poetry mentor for Simon Fraser University's The Writer's Studio.

Crying Dress by Cassidy McFadzean

An abstract beige book cover. A woman with blonde hair sits on a chair with her hands in her lap.

Crying Dress is a poetry collection rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry while adopting its own spin and linguistic play that challenges an idea of poetic coherence. It spans various locations and brings together scenes from intimate moments in domestic life to ones featuring the ghosts of Brooklyn.

Regina-raised Cassidy McFadzean is a past finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her poetry books are Drolleries and Hacker Packer , which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. She also wrote a crown of sonnets called Third State of Being. She currently lives in Toronto.

A Fate Worse Than Death by Nisha Patel

A book cover of hand prints. A woman with long brown hair puts her hands in front of her.

A Fate Worse Than Death is a poetry collection that uses the author's own medical records to investigate the worthiness of the disabled life. It explores how her multiple disabilities affect her daily life and shows how poetry allows her to offer complexity to her experiences — her pain, sickness, anger but also love.

Nisha Patel is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton and a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. She is the author of Coconut . A disabled and queer artist, she won the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Edmonton Artists' Trust Fund.

Wet by Leanne Dunic

A red book cover. A woman with long black curled hair and red lipstick.

Wet follows a Chinese American model working in Singapore who wants better for the world: fair labour rights, breathable air and connection. With a mastery of photography and language, Wet tells her story as she feels lost and observes migrant workers in dangerous conditions.

When you can read it: April 6, 2024

Leanne Dunic is an artist, musician, writer and PhD candidate. Her work includes poetry book To Love the Coming End and One and Half of You , which was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2021 by CBC Books . She won the 2021 LA Review Flash Fiction Award and currently lives in Vancouver.

Songbook by Steven Heighton, edited by Ginger Pharand

A book cover of a guitar and a man walking on a road alone. A man with brown hair and scruff.

Songbook brings together the lyrics and music of the late award-winning author and musician Steven Heighton, who died suddenly of cancer during an intensely creative period of writing. The poems are accompanied by chords, allowing musicians to bring them to life.

When you can read it: April 23, 2024

Steven Heighton was a musician and author of 20 books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including Afterlands and Governor General's Literary Award winning The Waking Comes Late . He lived in Kingston, Ontario.

Steven Heighton, Governor General's Literary Award-winning poet, dead at 60

Ginger Pharand is a Kingston-based editor, educator and psychotherapist.

Limited Verse by David Martin

A book cover that looks like a rusting journal. A man with glasses wearing a pink velvet suit.

Limited Verse is a collection of classic poems with a new twist — they're translated into New English, made up of only 850 words.

When you can read it: April 30, 2024

David Martin is an author of poetry collections Kink Bands and Tar Swan , which was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Martin won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2014 .

I Will Get Up Off Of by Simina Banu

A book cover of a white chair against a blue background. A person wearing a black t-shit and baseball cap in black and white.

I Will Get Up Off Of is a poetry collection about trying to leave a chair. Bound by anxiety and depression and looking for hope everywhere from fitness influencers to psychics, the poems eventually become more and more desperate and highlight the importance of art when it comes to survival.

When you can read it: May 21, 2024

Simina Banu is a Montreal-based author. Having published two chapbooks before, her first full-length collection of poetry was POP . Her poetry has appeared in filling Station, untethered, In/Words Magazine and the Feathertale Review, among others.

Barfly by Michael Lista

A black book cover with a little fly on red writing. A man with a beard poses outdoors.

At once hilarious and raw, Barfly uses Byronic rhymes and Auden's meters to discuss twenty-first century topics.

When you can read it: June 4, 2024

Michael Lista is a Toronto-based poet and journalist, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of several books of poetry and a collection of essays. Lista was the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, The Sting , is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.

Lossless by Matthew Tierney

An abstract blue and green book cover. A bland man holds his glasses in one hand in a room with wires.

Lossless is a poetry collection that explores the connection between algorithms and sonnets, viewing the verses as lines of code. It does this all while accessing inherently human experiences of loss of relationships, faith, childhood and people.

When you can read it: June 5, 2024

Matthew Tierney is the author of four books of poetry, including Midday at the Super-Kamiokande which was nominated for a ReLit Award. He is the winner of the 2013 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and is also a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award and the P.K. Page Founders' Award. He lives in Toronto.

Unwashed by Daniel Maluka

A Black man stands in front of a graffitied garage.

Unwashed is a poetry collection that reflects the author's experience as an immigrant to Canada and the themes of growing up, love and alienation. Image-rich and intense, the poems explore the city of Toronto in a loud and unapologetic manner.

When you can read it: June 15, 2024

Daniel Maluka is an artist and writer from South Africa based in Toronto. Unwashed is his debut poetry collection.

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How to Write the AP Lit Poetry Essay

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Tips for Writing the AP Lit Poetry Essay

2. Craft a Compelling Thesis

3. Use Textual Evidence

4. Strong Organization and Grammar

Common Mistakes on the AP Literature Poetry Essay

1. Thesis is not arguable and is too general

2. Using vague, general statements rather than focusing on analysis of the poem

3. Not using transitions to connect between paragraphs

4. Textual evidence is lacking or not fully explained

5. Not writing an outline

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