Week 3 Notes

This past week, students met one of the most interesting and most discussed characters in twentieth century poetry: J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot's creation, to many critics, embodies most completely the disillusion and angst of modern life.

The poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," places an entirely different set of demands on the reader than the Imagist poems we read the week prior. Imagists ask readers to closely examine the world around them, while poets like Eliot ask readers to examine their interior worlds. Both methods, one external one internal, result in readers of Modernist poetry questioning their personal values as well as what is really important to life in general. As the world around the Modernists was rapidly becoming less understandable, it seems natural that this questioning would take place. Different interpretations of how to do it gives us the stylistic variety that characterizes the poetry of this time.

In addition to our reading work this week, students also got started on their first vocabulary list and exercised their analytical and evaluative skills by revising a comparison paragraph writing assignment. This "comparison paragraph" will be the cornerstone task of many writing assignments over the course of this semester. Students will use it as their foundation to build their writing into the type of thesis-driven essay that they will be expected to write in Composition and for their Junior research papers.

In the coming week, we will be taking a look at one more trend and set of poetic voices as we read Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer, some of the great Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance.