Study Guide

Final Exam Study Guide:

[note: exam will be cumulative.  If you attended class regularly and took notes, actively engaged in blogging, and completed all the required reading, you should be able to do well on the exam given, of course, some additional studying / refreshing]

The exam will be held on Saturday, April 26 between 12:00 – 3:00–the same location as our regular class.

STRUCTURE:

(1) Text IDs—15 total @ 1 points each = 15%—take 30 minutes.  Identify the author of each excerpt (don’t worry about the poem title).  Consider this section of the exam more of a celebratory collage of quotes rather than a soul-destroying inquest.

• Most of these quotes will all be from poems that received some attention in class; I won’t go out of my way to trick you with these.  The study guide includes a list of authors, but I won’t provide a list on the exam itself–I hope you’re familiar enough with the names of the major players by now!  The quotes will all be from poems (as opposed to prose).

(2) Short Answer (4-6 sentences / one substantial paragraph)—5 total @ 5 points each = 25%—take 30 minutes.  You will have some choice in the matter (choosing from 7 or 8 options).  Here are a few sample questions:

• What distinguishes–in terms of his own biography and the philosophy underlying his poems–the work of Robinson Jeffers?
• Please discuss Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The'” as a response to “The Waste Land”? (I could substitute any number of poems here).
• What is the grounding argument in Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”? I could ask the same question in regard to Hulme’s or Eliot’s or Yeats’s prose.
• What makes the work of Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson or Charles Baudelaire “modern” on the level of form or content. In hindsight, whose work does it anticipate? There will be at least ONE question about proto-modernism (those who came before modern poetry proper, but whom we still consider modern).  
• Describe how Mullen adapts and extends the work of Gertrude Stein. Some version of this question could be asked for either of our after-modernism authors.
• Expanded author IDs: Identify the passage and discuss its significance in relationship to the text from which it was taken, the movement and concepts to which it relates (e.g.: H.D.’s “Sea Garden” in relationship to imagism), and / or key info from an author headnote.  There will be at least TWO of these.

(3) Close Reading: (2-3 paragraphs)–1 total @ 20 points = 20%–take 30 minutes.

• I will give you three poems and ask that you choose one to explicate. Close Reading should be a familiar activity to you–you’ve likely done it in other classes, and it’s what we do any time we spend 20 minutes really unpacking a poem.  Close Reading simply means that you attend to how a poem’s form and content work together to create intellectual and affective significance (meanings, emotions, etc.). I will ask you to follow the structure we have used in class quizzes:
  • Paraphrase: Who is the speaker? What is the rhetorical situation of the poem? What does it describe? (So, for the Tate poem, you’d just say something like the poem’s speaker seems to be hanging around a cemetery where confederate soldiers are buried describing the dismal scene and mourning for some kind of loss.
  • Observe: what distinguishes the poem formally, tonally, sonically, it’s mood, its images, its metaphors, its twists and turns, its conflicts or ambiguities, etc.
  • Contextualize: what can you glean from the headnote or about what we’ve discussed in class about this poem’s  context (relevant context could include history, publication, biographical, cultural, etc.).
  • Analyze: Above, you observed a few things. You might have said, for example, that Tate uses a lot of alliteration. Here, you follow up on those observations by asking how they make or contribute to the poem’s meaning.
  • Argue: Offer a final statement that encapsulates the above information in the form of an argument–a strong claim about what your chosen poem means / accomplishes.

• As I suggest above, it will be important for you to identify the poem’s prominent formal features (the how of a poem: from line length and meter to sound and syntax) alongside its content (the what of a poem: its narrative, its topic, what it refers to ).  The interaction of form and content reveal a poem’s complex, layered, and, perhaps, ambiguous meanings. In short: each poem exists at some intersection between word and world; an attentive close reading gives a nuanced description of that crucial crossroad.

(4) Long Answer (6-8 substantial paragraphs)—1 total @ 40 points = 40%—take 60 minutes.  This portion of the exam will ask you to think substantially and comparatively about a set of texts we’ve read.  The comparative aspect is especially crucial: your essay should not merely work through four or five poems considered in isolation; rather, your essay should tell a compelling argumentative story connecting those texts.

You will be permitted to bring a single-side page of quotes to help you incorporate excerpts from the texts under consideration. You can also include a detailed outline on this paper if you so choose. I ask that you hand this paper in with your exam.  I encourage you to think in advance about your response, familiarize yourself with the texts you want to address, and come up with a general organizational strategy / outline.  All I ask is that you compose the essay itself during the exam itself. I will provide paper. Here is your prompt:

• Your Modernism: Using four poems that offer a chronological sweep of modern poetry—from its early beginnings in the nineteenth-century to the latest developments that we’ve tracked in this class—please tell your own critical “story” of modernism. You might track a very narrow set of concerns: gender, race, class, formal experimentation, ideas of the imagination, explicit or implicit responses to “The Waste Land,” responses to War and other crises.  You might alternately choose to organize your answer around a diversity of concerns, showing not a single tendency, but a range–a “big tent” modernism.”  This might just be a grab-bag of poems that were very important to you.  If that’s the case, this question just asks you to justify that sense of importance, to tell me a story about it.  This, above all, is your story.  You will be judged on the quality of your ideas, the clarity of your organization, and, most importantly, how well you define your unique vision of what modern poetry is and means, and why it continues to matter.

(5) Bonus Questions. There will be some bonus-points opportunity on the final exam–more difficult text IDs from poems not necessarily discussed in class, and fun facts form author bio notes.

MATERIALS: What Will Be Covered? 

POETS:

• Walt Whitman
• Charles Baudelaire
• Emily Dickinson
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• William Butler Yeats
• Paul Lawrence Dunbar
• James W. Johnson
• T.S. Eliot
• Thomas Hardy
• Gertrude Stein
• Ezra Pound
• Robert Frost
• H.D.
• Mina Loy
• William Carolos Williams
• Claude McKay
• Wallace Stevens
• Wilfred Owen
• Marianne Moore
• Langston Hughes
• Robinson Jeffers
• Louis Zukofsky
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Robinson Jeffers
• Sterling Brown
• Hart Crane
• W.H. Auden
• Charles Reznikoff
• Harryette Mullen
• Jeffrey Pethybridge 

POEMS:

• 1855: “Song of Myself,” Sections 1-4, Walt Whitman (ANTH 4-6)
• 1856: “Poem of the Proposition of Nakedness,” Whitman (LINK)
• 1861: “A une passante,” Baudelaire (LINK)
• 1862: #341, Emily Dickinson (ANTH 36)
• 1867: “One’s Self I Sing,” Whitman (ANTH 3)
• 1877: “God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins (ANTH 76)
• 1877: “The Windhover,” Hopkins (ANTH 77)
• 1890: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” William Butler Yeats (ANTH 94-95)
• 1895: “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Lawrence Dunbar (LINK)
• 1900: “The Darkling Thrush” (originally titled “By the Century’s Deathbed”), Hardy (ANTH 48)
• 1908: “O Black Unknown Bards,” James W. Johnson, (ANTH 172-173)*
• 1909: “The Fascination with What’s Difficult,” Yeats (ANTH 101)
• 1910-11: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot, (ANTH 463)
• 1912:
• 1912: “A carafe, that is a blind glass,” Gertrude Stein (ANTH 180)
• 1913: “A Pact,” Ezra Pound (ANTH 350)
• 1912: “A Midnight Woman to the Bobby,” McKay (ANTH 500-501)
• 1912: “The Voice,” Hardy (ANTH 57)
• 1913: “In a Station of the Metro,” Pound (ANTH 351)
• 1914: “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost (ANTH 203-204)
• 1914: “Oread,” Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (ANTH 395)
• 1915: from “Songs to Joannes,” Mina Loy (ANTH 269-272)
• 1916: “Easter, 1916,” Yeats (ANTH 105)*
• 1916: “Sea Rose,” H.D. (ANTH 395)
• 1916: “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg, (ANTH 227)
• 1916: “Garden,” H.D. (ANTH 396-397)
• 1916: “The Young Housewife,” Williams Carlos Williams (ANTH 286)
• 1917: “Hysteria,” T.S. Eliot (LINK)
• 1917: “The Harlem Dancer,” Claude McKay (ANTH 501)
• 1917: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens (ANTH 244-246)
• 1917: “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Wilfred Owen (ANTH 525)
• 1917: “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen, (ANTH 527-528)
• 1918: “The Fish,” Marianne Moore (ANTH 436-437)
• 1919: “The Second Coming,” Yeats (ANTH 111)*
• 1920: “The Lynching,” Claude McKay (ANTH 502)
• 1920: “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound (ANTH 354-361)
• 1920: “Portrait of a Lady,” W.C. Williams (ANTH 289)
• 1921: “A Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes (ANTH 687-688)
•  1921: “America,” Claude McKay (ANTH 503)
• 1921: “The White City,” McKay (ANTH 503)
• 1921: “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens (ANTH 247)
• 1921: “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,”Stevens (ANTH 247)
• 1922: The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, 474-487
• 1923: “To Elsie,” “Red Wheel Barrow,” and “Spring and All” (ANTH 291-295)
• 1923: “Der Blinde Junge,” Mina Loy (ANTH 274)
• 1923: [I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed], Millay, (ANTH 512)
• 1923: From Cane “The Reapers,” “Harvest Song,” “Portrait in Georgia,”  Jean Toomer (ANTH 559-560 and LINK)
• 1925: “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes (ANTH 688)
• 1925: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” Helen Johnson (LINK)
• 1925: “I, Too,” Hughes (LINK)
• 1925: “Incident,” Cullen (ANTH 728)
• 1925: “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Robinson Jeffers (ANTH 415-416)
• 1927: “Poem Beginning ‘The’,” Louis Zukofsky (ANTH 733)
• 1928: “Hurt Hawks,” Robinson Jeffers (ANTH 416-417)
• 1930: “Ma Rainey,” Sterling Brown (ANTH 674)
• 1930: “Southern Road,” Sterling Brown (ANTH 673-674)
• 1930: “Cape Hatteras” and the proem (“To Brooklyn Bridge” from The Bridge, Hart Crane (ANTH 631-636)
• 1935: “Mozart, 1935,” Wallace Stevens (LINK)
• 1939: “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” W.B. Yeats (ANTH 142)
• 1939: “Politics,” Yeats (ANTH 143)
• 1939: “Musee des beaux Arts,” Auden (ANTH 797)
• 1939: “September 1, 1939,” W.H. Auden (ANTH 801)
• 1940: “Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens (ANTH 255-256)
• 1942: “Little Gidding,” sections IV and V, T.S. Eliot (ANTH 493-495)
• 1944: from The Walls Do Not Fall, H.D., (ANTH 401-405)
• 1951: “Dream Boogie,” “Theme for English B,” and “Harlem” from Montage of a Langston Dream Deferred, Hughes (ANTH 700-704)
• 1954: “Debris of Life and Mind,” Stevens (LINK)
• 1965: “Negroes,” Charles Reznikoff (LINK). Make sure you read the headnote for Reznikoff so you grasp the documentary nature of his project in this poem and in the excerpts from his larger work Holocaust.
• 1975: From Holocaust, Reznikoff (ANTH 543-545)
• 2013: Striven, The Bright Treaties, Jeffrey Pethybridge
• 2006: from Trimmings and Muse & Drudge, Harryette Mullen (focus on parts we discussed in class).  A general sense of how these poems work and the kinds of interpretation strategies we brought to them would suffice.

• from The Symbolism of Poetry, W.B. Yeats (ANTH 877-883)
• from “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.E. Hulme (ANTH 889-895)
• “Imagisme,” F.S. Flint (LINK, 3 pages), and “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,”Ezra Pound (LINK, 7 pages).  For both links, you will need to click through the page images to read each piece in its entirety.
• Feminist Manifesto, Mina Loy (ANTH 921-925)
• “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot (ANTH 941-947)
• “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes (ANTH 964-967)

KEY CONCEPTS AND MOVEMENTS: These are items that you should be able to discuss in the context of short-answer questions.  You might also include them as part of you longer essay response.  On Monday, December 5 I will update the study guide with details from my own class notes (for those concepts not discussed in the ANTH intro).

• Mastery of Form / Deformation of Mastery (from class notes).
• Tradition (See Eliot’s essay)
• Imagism (see prose from Pound and Flint as well as the ANTH intro).
• Symbolism (see Yeats’s essay on “The Symbolism of Poetry” as well as the overview in the ANTH intro).
• See also our quiz on symbolism / imagism
• Objectivism (read the Zukofsky headnote in ANTH and the ANTH intro).
• Harlem Renaissance (from ANTH intro and class notes)
• Modernism—social, cultural, scientific and aesthetic contexts (ANTH intro and Class Notes)