In the “Intro to Poetry” chapter, we covered the first steps to writing about poetry–choosing a poem, reading it carefully to think about what the poem means to you, and brainstorming ideas about what the author is trying to tell readers through the poem. In this chapter, we’ll take the next steps to writing critically about poetry. These are steps that you’ll need to take when writing about any written text, whether literary or academic, as well.

Step 3: Research the Poem

While your response and connection to a particular poem is dependent upon your own personal experiences, part of better understanding poetry is learning more about the author and the context of the poem. The combination of your own understanding and the support of strong outside sources will make your argument about the poem more powerful.

Primary Sources

Primary Evidence is the thing we study. In academic writing, this kind of evidence differs according to discipline. In the field of English literature, primary evidence is the poem, novel, short story, play, or memoir you are studying. In this case, your primary source is the poem you have chosen. Always cite the poem in your Works Cited page, along with any other sources!

A student, for example, might present direct quotes from the Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” to support specific claims he makes in his argument, as well as summarized and paraphrased passages in which he describes, in his own words, key occurrences in the poem. The following examples demonstrate the difference between quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing passages from the poem.

When we quote directly from a poem, we can embed the words from the poem in our own words, or we can set the quote from the poem apart with a colon. Here are two different ways a student could quote from the poem:

When we summarize a passage, we portray to the reader what the passage says in our own words. Below, a student summarizes a passage from the poem, condensing a lengthy stanza describing the lilac plant into one sentence:

A paraphrase is a middle ground between a direct quote and a summary. Paraphrasing gives readers more details about what is happening in a passage, without directly quoting the passage. While a summary is shorter than the original passage, since a paraphrase restates in your own words what the poet says, it tends to be about the same length as the original. Here, the student paraphrases a stanza about the journey of the coffin into his own words :

These examples from the primary text support the student’s argument, but how does he decide when to quote, summarize, or paraphrase? These decisions are important ones for effectively incorporating primary evidence into an essay. Here are a few guidelines as you consider these options in your own writing:

Secondary Sources

Although the proof that this poem reflects the speaker’s mourning for Lincoln must come from the poem itself, the primary source, the student can use secondary sources to (a) help explain his perspective on the poem and to (b) indicate how his argument fits into the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the poem. While plenty of people have contributed to the conversation on the meaning of this poem, the student’s goal is to say something new, to bring the reader fresh insight about the poem, to contribute something original to the conversation. To clarify the significance of his argument, he can integrate material from carefully selected scholarly articles.

The Research Process

Start by creating a list of questions you still have about the poem you’ve chosen. What would you like to know about the author and his/her experiences? For example, if you’ve chosen “Mother to Son,” by Langston Hughes, you might wonder if the poem is about his actual mother. For Steven Crane’s, “War is Kind,” you might wonder what his experience with war was.

While there are certainly times when citing a website or other online source might be appropriate, when writing a paper about literature for an English course, the sources you choose should be scholarly articles and/or books by people who are qualified to discuss literature. Websites like Wikipedia, for example, can give you a basic overview of the poem and its author, but Wikipedia is not considered to be a scholarly source. A scholar of literature would not be swayed by an argument based on the claim that “I saw it on Wikipedia.”

Since writing about literature is a step toward learning to write about academic texts, it’s important to also use academic sources in our discussions about literature. While you may have some luck finding good articles or even the full text of a book with a Google search, your best bet is to use the YC databases. In addition to knowing that you are finding academic sources, another benefit to using the databases is that there is a Cite button on every source that gives you the correct citation!

Here is a video with a brief review of how to use the databases at YC:

If you need more help, do contact the librarians at YC. They are extremely helpful!

About the Author

You might want to begin by looking for the author’s biography. After performing our own analysis, it can be intriguing (and often helpful) to consider the author’s life. For instance, Hughes wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, the first large-scale African American artistic movement. Although he had read the poetry of many well-regarded British and American poets, he was determined to raise the status of African American folk forms, challenging the idea that great art must follow the traditions of European forms. Adding this biographical and historical component to our study increases our understanding of the importance of Hughes’s contribution to the improvement of African American lives and his celebration of African Americans’ part in shaping U.S. culture.

Author’s biographies can often be found in the Literature Criticism by Gale database. The video below shows how to find an author’s biography in the database and showcases how this first source can be a springboard for the rest of your research.

Please note that the Literature Online database has been renamed Literature Criticism by Gale.

About the Poem

The author’s biography might answer many of our research questions. In addition, the Gale author pages usually link to other articles that are related to the author and their work.

As we continue on in our research, we have several additional options:

• If you still have additional questions, your next step should be to attempt to try to find the answers to those questions. Other literature databases include JSTOR and ProQuest Literature.
• You might also choose to try to find a source about the poem you’ve chosen to see what academic scholars have said about it. For example, you might search for a source that discusses Dickinson’s “I saw a dying eye” to see what scholars believe it means.
• You might choose to try to find a source that discusses the author’s work as a whole. For example, you might find a source that discusses Langston Hughes’ poetry, rather than just “Mother to Son.”
• You might look for a source that focuses on the theme of the poem and uses the poem as an example. For example, you might look at the psychology of grief to better understand “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.”
• You might look for context of the poem. If the poem is about a historical event, like Browning’s “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning,” which are about the love story of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, you might want to find more information about their relationship. Or you might want to look for information about the Civil War to better understand Crane’s perspective on war in “War is Kind.”

Creating a Research Journal

It’s a really good idea to create a Research Journal to help you keep track of your sources and what you are learning from them. See “Keeping a Research Journal” if you need a reminder of how to create a research journal.

Here is a sample research journal based on Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 66” (note that sources range from a biography of Shakespeare to an overview of the history of sonnets):

Here is a video in which Dr. Palmer shows a class how to conduct research and compile a research journal for Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 66.”

MLA Citation Review

Please complete this lesson on MLA formatting: 

Citing Articles and Books

When using library databases, be sure to look for the “Cite” button. Clicking on the “Cite” button will allow you to select MLA formatting and copy the correct citation directly into your Works Cited page. However, is never hurts to review the basic MLA formats for citing articles and books. The following examples demonstrate both the correct MLA formatting for sources in your Works Cited page and for in text citations.

Article online:

Article in a database:

A book:

A Poem from This Text:

Note that the in text citation (what is in parenthesis after a quote) is the first word/s in the Works Cited listing.  Every source listed in your Works Cited should be cited at least once in the text of the paper.

Creating a Works Cited page

In an MLA paper, the sources are listed at the end of the paper on the Works Cited page. Please follow the guidelines discussed in the video below when creating your Works Cited page. Remember, you can simply click the cite button for each source you find in the Library Databases for the correct MLA citation.

Step 4: Create a Thesis and Outline

Once you have completed your research, your next step is to think about what you want to say about the poem. Hopefully, you are clear at this point about what the poem means to you and what you think the author is trying to say. Now your job is to articulate an argument about the poem based on your reading of the poem and your research. Topics might include the following:

1. What the theme of the poem is.
2. How the author uses the elements of poetry to create the theme of the poem.
3. How understanding the author or the cultural context of the poem deepens the meaning.

Generally, your research will guide your decision about what to write about. Think about what you think is the most important thing for readers to understand about the poem.

If you are still completely stumped about what to write about, you might choose option #2 because it is pretty straightforward. Since you’ve already done quite a bit of reflecting on the poem, in addition to all of your research, you should have a clear idea of what the theme is and what elements of poetry are used in the poem. Your thesis, then, is a combination of the two. ie “The author shows readers that __________ by using ______, ______, and _______.”

Your paper should have a minimum of three points, but it can have more. Let’s say that a student has chosen Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 66” as their poem. Here is one possible thesis:

Note that the thesis combines the theme of the poem (in bold), as well as the elements of poetry (in italics) that help to create the theme–emotional plea, irony, asyndeton, antithesis, and parallel structures. Each of these five points would be discussed in its own paragraph in the body of the paper, so each of the points would be one point on the outline. In addition, the student should include at least one quote from the poem for each point.

The outline might look something like this:

Here’s a video in which Dr. Palmer shows students how to create a thesis and outline of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 66.”

Step 5: Drafting Your Paper

Once you have a clear idea of your thesis and the passages in the work that best support it, you can begin to shape and refine the essay. The great thing about having an outline is that you can be confident that your paper will be well-organized and contain all the information necessary to make a strong analytic argument about the poem.

Writing an Introduction

Make sure your introduction accurately reflects what you end up saying about the poem. You should start with a hook that connects the theme of the poem to your readers’ experiences. Avoid generalizations, but make sure to have some kind of attention grabber that will draw readers into the paper. Next, introduce the topic–in this case, you will want to include the author’s full name and the title of the poem. Finally, complete your introduction with your thesis.

Here is a video explaining how these three components create the foundation for a strong introduction and conclusion:

Writing the Argument

Make sure your body supports your thesis with good topic sentences and concrete examples…Remember that the best way to support a thesis is to cite and analyze carefully selected passages from the text that relate directly to it. You want to have at least one quote from the poem and one quote from one of your secondary sources in each body paragraph to support your thoughts.

Three parts of a paragraph

1. Topic sentence/Claim
2. Support/Quote
3. Analysis—underscore relevance to thesis

Here’s an example body paragraph from a student paper on Lawrence’s poem, “Snake.” Note that the parts of the paragraph are formatted to match the three parts listed above.

Note how the last sentence tells the reader what the examples show. Also note that the in text citation shows the LINE of the poem only.

The Quote Formula

The Quote Formula is a formula for using quotes correctly in your writing. Always remember to surround quotes with your own words. You do this by introducing the quote and explaining the quote.

1. Introduce the quote.  Here, you tell readers what the author is doing.

2. Give the quote.  Here, you give an actual quote from the poem. Make sure to use quotation marks. The number after the quote is the line of the poem in which the quote is found.

3. Explain the quote. Tell readers what the quote means.

To illustrate, take a look at the next paragraph in the paper quoted above (formatted to match the three parts of the quote formula).

Some Drafting Tips

1. Use Present Tense
2. Include quotes from the poem (minimum of one per body paragraph)
3. Include quotes from outside sources (minimum of one per body paragraph)
4. Use MLA citation

Here’s a video in which Dr. Palmer shows how to write a draft of a paper from an outline:

Remember, your paper should be based on your own thoughts and observations about the poem. Your outside research should be used to support and strengthen your own thoughts!

Here’s a draft of the Shakespeare paper we’ve been discussing:

Attributions:

• MLA Citation and Steps content created by Dr. Karen Palmer and licensed under CC BY SA.
• All Examples created by Dr. Karen Palmer and licensed under CC BY SA.
• Content adapted from “Experiencing the Power of Poetry” by Tanya Long Bennet in Writing and Literature, licensed CC BY SA.