ENG 208:
First read
Writing About Poetry at the OWL at Purdue's Online Writing Lab. Also see
Quoting Poetry within a Paper using MLA Documentation to inform you while writing your essays.
Log on to EBSCOHost and search for "Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows." You will come across an essay of the same name written by Terence Hoagwood of Texas A&M University published in The Explicator. Read this and then answer the following question.
Essay:
William J. Maxwell shows how Claude McKay in particular is able to meet "the need for a medium of expanded radical communication" (qtd. in Hoagwood) through his use of Elizabethan verse forms.
Choose a poet from the assigned Harlem Renaissance poetry who has written in either closed form or blank verse. Consider how the selected poems are able to invoke feelings of fear, loss, oppression, and a yearning for change through the poet's use of language.
Please consider specifically (please research definitions where necessary): whether the poet engages in hypotaxis or parataxis, a poem is monologic or dialogic, the poet uses metonymy or synecdoche. Look at also: the use of meter and whether syllables and words are made of iambs, anapests, dactyls, trochees, or pyrrhics. Look for examples of enjambment, caesura, elision as well as falling meter and iambic feet.
This essay should follow all regular MLA guidelines as described at the OWL at Purdue's
MLA Guide. Your sources should include the following as well as whatever
academic research you do:
Poet's Lastname, Poet's Firstname. "Poem Title."
Literature of the Black Diaspora. Handout. Poems for Study. (Richard Georges.) H. Lavity Stoutt Community College. Nov. 2011. Print.
Hoagwood, Terence. "Claude McKay's HARLEM SHADOWS."
Explicator 68.1 (2010): 51-54.
Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.
The essay is due Tuesday November 22nd 2011 and should be emailed to me and not printed. On that day we shall have a lecture and classroom discussion on the Contemporary poets assigned.
