Formative Essay

Guidance for Formative Essay

The best poems have a path and characters and that is enough. ~Alice Oswald

Alice Oswalds analogy between poetry and gardens may be helpfully extended to essays, too! Your first essay for this course is a commentary essay of 1500 words on a poem (or excerpt, if a long poem) by one of the poets covered in the class thus far. Your essay will be a guide through the garden of the poem, providing a clear path (i.e., your argument, which will suggest the pattern of the poem as a whole) and pausing along the way to consider specific characters or features of the poem (i.e., the concrete details of the poem that constitute the expressive pattern you hope to illumine for your reader).

Please integrate two secondary sources into your commentary and include an in-text citation when referencing (author, pg. #).

The Hodgson Study Guide Notes pp. 16-20 (Hodgson, pp. 218-232) provide very valuable guidance for writing your essay from beginning to end. For this exercise, please do not rely on generative AI study guides/writing tools. I am not looking for technical mastery in your commentary but your developing grasp of how poetry works, its meaning, and your relation to it. A few highlights from Hodgson below:

A successful commentary involves managing to tell the story of the poem (in terms of its form, not just its content.

An essay is a chance for you to substantiate your personal response.

Your reader wants to see that you can pay patient attention to a poems details and communicate that attention in an orderly manner.

The starting point is not abstract planning but attentive reading.

Make use of the questions under How do you develop ideas? as a starting point.

Dont forget as you develop your ideas to pause along the way and ask: What are my own thoughts, feelings, preconceptions regarding the issue at hand? How does this poem affirm, clash with, surprise or refine my preconceptions?; Does the poem react appropriately and imaginatively to its situation? Does it move you?

In a close-reading essay, the challenge is to find a shape that organises your observation of local details into a coherent whole.

please find attached the secondary source and another secondary source listed:

SECONDARY:

Kristine Bell, Word and World: Bodily Perception in the Narrative Non-fiction of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd in Northern Scotland, 2022-11, Vol.13 (2): 130-151.

Samantha Walton, The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). (online access via Hesburgh Library)

PRIMARY:

The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (London: Canongate Books Ltd, 2011).