for 2/11.

Read the assigned poems and "Yeats: Myth and Philosophy" on Blackboard. Post on the poems, but your post should be the first step towards your paper and may encompass other poems as well. Your paper is a critical study, and therefore, you should do the following things:

1. Establish the necessity for your essay - why are you presuming on the reader's time with this commentary on Yeats
2. Comment on other, similar studies... this will require a little research. How is yours adding something. This isn't as hard as it seems... it's something of a ritual or formality.
3. Pursue your analysis of the poems, connecting your particular approach to a broader view of Yeats's poetics and modernism in general. You don't have to agree with the view I've put forth in this blog or in class, but you should show how a certain aspect of the poet's work may change the way we see him. In this lies the value of a critical study.
4. You don't necessarily have to "prove" some heavy-handed point. Instead, your piece can be an exploration of an aspect of this poet, perhaps seen through the lens of another thinker. You should stick with the subject, but your conclusion may contain questions as well as answers.
5. Avoid obvious, general topics, such as Yeats and the church. Instead, look for an approach that gives you a task, a way of reading Yeats afresh: "Yeats' metaphors for the body"; "'Common' Irish Women versus Heroic Female Figures in Yeats"; "Artificiality and Naturalness in the 'Byzantium' poems"; "Contemporary figures Yeats refers to by name - and those he alludes to obliquely"... Find your own - whatever intrigues you: this is just to give you a sense of the possibilities.

This will require some outside research, and I strongly suggest you work on it this weekend, since it is due Wed. of next week. I also suggest that you e-mail me with your plan - I will e-mail you back with suggestions and comments. If you like, include several ideas. Several people have already done this. I suggest Harold Bloom's book Yeats or Helen Vendler's studies... You may want to use the databases (accessible from my.newschool.edu) to find articles. Again, the criticism is not so much a source of ideas as a background to your own ideas. You should not quote too heavily from the poems... focus on specific lines: indent and single-space quotes. Include a "works cited" page in MLA format. E-mail me with any questions or concerns!