hould demonstrate your understanding of the elements of poetry and of how these
elements function in the text you choose to analyze. You will construct a response to one of the following
prompts, using textual evidence (quotes from the poems) to support your thesis. Your essay should
demonstrate your ability to make stylistic and structural choices appropriate to literary analysis (use present
tense to describe the events of a poem, craft paragraphs with effective topic sentences, avoid first person,
incorporate quoted material effectively, use MLA format for parenthetical citations and your Work Cited entry,
etc.). If you have questions about MLA format, the Purdue OWL website is a helpful resource:
owl.english.purdue.edu.
In general, when you quote lines from a poem, use a slash mark (/) to show where the line breaks occur, and
put the line numbers of the material you’ve quoted in parentheses after the quote (NOT the page number). If
you must quote more than three lines, use block quote format (but try to avoid long quotes, since this is a short
essay).