These are questions from my midterm:
Describe the importance of the particular text as a whole. Each response should be one short paragraph.
1- Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
2-A Supermarket in California
by Allen Ginsberg
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
3- Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth (1800)
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility:
the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the
tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which
was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and
does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful
composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is
carried on.
4- As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
5- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by: Robert Frost
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
6- Harlem by Langston Hughes
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
7- The Fish
by Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
8- Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985
by Adrienne Rich
Coming from a culture . . . which encourages poets to think of
ourselves as alienated from the sensibility of the general population,
which casually and devastatingly marginalizes us . . . coming from this
North American dominant culture which so confuses us, telling us poetry
is neither economically profitable nor politically effective and that
political dissidence is destructive to art, coming from this culture
that tells me I am destined to be a luxury, a decorative garnish on the
buffet table of the university curriculum, the ceremonial occasion, the
national celebration - what am I to make, I thought, of that remark?
9- The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
10- Incident
by Countee Cullen
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.