Poetry Analysis Essay: A poetry analysis essay is not as tricky as your English teacher my portray it to be. It is just another essay but instead of taking a deep dive into logic and facts as we do in other types of essays such as process analysis essay or critical analysis, in poetry analysis essay, most importantly emotions, the psychology of the reader and the various meanings between the lines are given a higher priority.
Before you start off with writing poetry analysis essay just after a rudimentary reading of the particular poem, you need to be clear about the purpose and objective of the poetry analysis essay and be well aware of the target audience that you are writing for. Other than this, one needs to be clear that whether the poetry analysis essay that you are writing is from your point of view or from a neutral observer’s point of view or is it from the poet’s point of view.
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The point of view in the body of your poetry analysis is extremely important because most of the poems that you would be expected tp analyse will be a classic literary pieces where different people perceive the poem differently through different lenses and hence get out various forms of meaning and analogies from them. This is the reason that we should be clear on what is the objective of the essay and who is the one who will be reading your poetry analysis essay (your target audience or TG)
Communicating with your reader is the key to writing poetry analysis essay because someone who is reading your analysis essay will most surely be the same person who would not have understood the deep meaning of the poem. As a result of which, a reader might be searching for different shades of meaning of the poem in your essay and you need to keep in mind whether your analysis is unidirectional, bidirectional or multidirectional in nature.
Usually, different readers will have different responses to the poetic communication in a poem which is why it is always recommended that a poetry analysis essay is written in a multi-directional point of view so that you can target the mass audience. But if you are sure about your target audience and you know the thought process of that the target audience then you can take the risk of writing your poetry analysis essay in a unidirectional nature. But if you are writing a poetry analysis essay for your school assignment or college project, then your analysis of the poem should be as neutral as possible without imposing your own perceptions on the analysis of the poem.
How to Start a Poetry Analysis Essay?
Before you go on to start writing a poetry analysis essay you need to understand how to choose the poem which you are going to analyse because not every topic on the face of the planet might be your forte.
One needs to always keep in mind that not every poem can be analysed from the same point of you and hence you need to be sure what your strong foot is. Because poems can be written on various topics ranging from politics to satire to free verse.
If you or someone who is into a narrative, dramatic and lyrical poems then you need to start writing or analysing search points to write an effective essay. Writing an analysis for free verse article essay can be very different from writing analysis for a narrative essay and one needs to keep in mind the different formats and tone of the essays depending on the types of the poem that we are analysing.
Some of the most common types of poems that you’ll find are a sonnet, haiku, free verse, villanelle, limerick and acrostic.
It goes without saying that to write a good poetry analysis essay one needs to thoroughly read the poem. The poem in question might be a 5 line poem for a 20 line poem but we should always read it thoroughly and when I say thoroughly it means reading between the lines and understanding each and every word and the objective behind writing that word in the whole scheme of things. Poems by writers like Frost Bryant or Dickinson will have deep notes and meanings between each word and hence the reason behind using those particular words in those particular situations or paragraphs of the poem is important to analyse the poem thoroughly and give a meaningful conclusion in your poetry analysis.
Once you have read the poem thoroughly then write down two or three objectives of your poetry analysis essay and the target audience that you are targeting to as discussed above. Once you are done with reading the poem, getting your objective straight and having clarity about your target audience, now is the time that you put up your point of views and along with you need to put up pieces of evidence and discussions that support your point of view.
Don’t straightaway start writing your point of views in an essay. Before even starting your poetry analysis a make notes for yourself with either flowchart or bulletin points about all the arguments that you would like to put in the essay and the supporting evidence for the same along with additional comments or character analysis in the particular essay that you might think is important for the thorough analysis of the poem. These sticky notes are only for yourself so that you can keep track of the direction in which your essay is headed towards.
Pattern of Poetry Analysis Essay
Once you have written down all the arguments and the supporting facts that you would like to put in the body of the essay, now structurize your essay and prepare a proper organisational chart. There is no one particular format for poetry analysis essay but the safest structure would be introduction, body and conclusion.
In the introduction part of your essay, assume that the person reading your essay is not at all familiar with the author or poem or the whole context of poetry analysis and hence make sure to get the attention of the reader right in the beginning of your essay. Avoid using too many poetic jargons in your introduction because your target audience will most probably be someone who is not literature sensitive and hence it is always safe to keep the english and your vocabulary as simple as possible. The introduction can be anywhere between hundred to 150 words depending on the type of essay and your target audience but never mix the analysis part of your essay in the introduction. Always remember that the introduction part should give a subtle highlight of the poem and the analysis that is to come further.
The body of the essay is the crux of the essay and here is where you will be stating your arguments, points of views, opinions of the writer and yours along with supporting notes of evidence and facts that you have found out within the poem. As mentioned earlier, make sure that the body of the essay is multi-directional and don’t confine yourself to just one point of view. While reading and analysing the essay put yourself in the shoes of people from different walks of life and start thinking along their train of thought so that you might come up with the different point of views and angles for the same poem that you are analysing. The body of the essay can be anywhere between 500 to 800 words but make sure it’s crisp and easy to read.
Write the entire essay in the third person’s viewpoint or narration so that readers having a different point of views can easily synchronise their thought process with your own thought process which should be in multi-directional nature.
Tips and Tricks to Write a Poetry Analysis
While we have covered the fundamentals of writing a poetry analysis essay in the above paragraphs, the following points will help you to tackle certain nuances in writing poetry analysis essay so that you can gain attention and impress your readers.
- Make sure the analysis of the poem is done based on the characters actual and figurative that are present in the poem because if character analysis is done within the poetry analysis of the essay then it is easy for the reader to understand the poem.
- Avoid being one-directional in analysing your essay because your reader might not share the same thought process as yours and hence be as neutral as possible and keep your favourite-isms and biases aside while writing a poetry analysis essay.
- Make sure you use simple language to describe your essay because the objective of your essay is to make your reader understand the poem and not to make him or her more confused.
- Analysis of the poem should be written such that the reader after reading essay will go back to the poem and read it once and understand it in one shot.
- If you are writing a poetry analysis essay for your school assignments and project works, make sure to include flowcharts and bullet points to highlight how every aspect of the poem is linked to one another to ultimately lead to the conclusion. Understanding the chronology is the most important part here.
- Never make the mistake of writing your poetry analysis essay from the point of view of the poet. Which means that the essay should be written from third-person’s point of view so that the tone and texture of the essay are kept as neutral as possible.
- The objective of the essay should be clearly stated in the introduction part itself so that the reader has the option whether to continue reading your essay or not and hence to achieve this, the objective should be as generalized as possible. But if you are targeting a niche audience then make sure your objective is confined and put into the required silo so that your essay is targeted only at your audience.
- Make sure each paragraph does not contain more than 5 to 6 lines because your essay should be as clutter-free as possible so that it is visually pleasing for the reader to read it again and again.
- Given the amount of analysis that one might find on the same poem in the internet and various books, make sure your essays stand out from the crowd right from its objective to supporting arguments and the conclusion part.
- Last but definitely not the least, make sure your essay is enjoyable and easy to read and your poetry analysis essay is more preferable for the reader than the poem itself.