Poetry Analysis Essay Help-Lola Ridge’s “The Fifth-Floor Window”
The second half of this course focuses on explication as a means of interpreting poetry. The major assignment for this unit is an explication essay. In an essay of 1500-1800 words (roughly 5-7 pages), you will explicate the following poem contained in our anthology (initial page number in parentheses): Lola Ridge’s “The Fifth-Floor Window” (p. 39) At its most basic level, explication involves a line-by-line commentary on a particular poem, but as W.K. Wimsatt points out, explication is based on the assumption that good poetry coheres, that its parts (such as individual lines) fit the whole. Thus, your paper will also offer an interpretation of the entire poem you select. This interpretation will serve as your paper’s argument—a brief summary of which should appear as the thesis statement in the first or second paragraph. Then, your explication of the various lines will provide the evidence that supports your interpretation. Since an explication essay involves looking closely at a poem by yourself, you should not conduct any outside research. The interest of your essay will derive from the insights you have to offer about a particular poem. However, to frame your essay within a broader critical context, you must use your selected poem as a means of engaging one of the major claims that Wimsatt makes about poetry in the essays we are reading in The Verbal Icon. More specifically, use the prompt below to guide your explication of the poem you select. That poem should prove or illustrate one of the principles that Wimsatt discusses. Based on which poem you select, use the appropriate prompt below to structure your essay: 6.How does Lola Ridge’s use of periphrasis and other forms of indirect identification add to the overall effect of “The Fifth-Floor Window”? (See “The Substantive Level” in Wimsatt.) Model your essay on the explications we perform in class. Consider our reading of Millay’s “Only until this cigarette is ended” on October 6: Millay’s sonnet explores the tension that exists at the moment of separation, when a person or thing is physically absent but traces of that person or thing remain in the memory. A line-by-line explication of the poem supports Wimsatt’s claim that “the greater the difference in meaning between rhyme words the more marked and the more appropriate will be the binding effect” (164) because Millay exploits the semantic tension between such rhyme words as “ended” and “extended” (ll. 1, 4). That is an interpretive argument that is supported by explication, and it engages one of Wimsatt’s claims. When you quote your selected poem, please be sure to cite line numbers (l. 1, ll. 2-3, etc.) and line breaks (/). You should cite Wimsatt by page number. Please use two sources: The New Anthology of American Poetry Volume Two Modernisms 1900-1950 by Axelrod, Roman, Travisano (page 39) and The Verbal Icon by W.K. Wimsatt.
