English 111 - Walker: Home

Topic

You will write a minimum 2,000-word research paper in which you will:

• analyze a poem read for this class;
• research the social, cultural, or economic context that produced the poem; and
• connect the poem to today’s society.

Your essay should be a combination of historical research, literary analysis, and research into the current situation described in the poem. Your research should give more background into the social and historical context of the time the poem was written, but you should also explain how that context is reflected in the work through your literary analysis. Your research should focus primarily on the time the poem was written rather than on the poet’s personal life though you can touch on the poet’s experiences if they are clearly represented in the poem.

Sources

Use a minimum of FIVE secondary sources. You may use books, periodicals, or websites.

• At least one of the five sources must be from the SBCC databases
• At least one literary critic must be used as a source
• Encyclopedias and other reference works (such as Wikipedia) do not count as sources, nor does the poem itself