Students should choose the subjects of their two close reading assignments from the authors and texts featured on the syllabus. For their final critical essays, they can chose from among the authors and texts featured on the syllabus or from those included in Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry (2022). These authors and texts are listed below. Also note that students may use the same poems and revised material from their earlier close reading essays in their final critical essay assignments.
Sample Final Essay Topics
- PERIOD: Revolutionaries (Wheatley, Adams, Jefferson)
- PERIOD: Civil War Poetry (Melville, Whitman, Dickinson)
- PERIOD: Civil Rights Poetry (Brooks, Hughes, Angelou)
- THEME: Patriotic Dissent Over Time (Dickinson, Popel, Smith)
- THEME: Early Feminists Through the “Pantry Door” (Bradstreet, Adams, Truth)
- THEME: Singing America in Different Keys: (Whitman, Hughes, Ginsburg)
Featured Texts (for close readings)
- Abigail and John Adams, Letters (1776)
- Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise” (1978)
- Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book” (1666)
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” (1960)
- Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death” (1862)
- John Dickinson, “The Liberty Song” (1768)
- Bob Dylan, “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” (1964)
- Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (1941)
- Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021)
- Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land” (1940)
- Joy Harjo, “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks” (2008)
- Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage” (1945, 1962)
- Langston Hughes, “I, Too” (1926) and “Harlem” (1951)
- Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)
- Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883)
- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural (1861) and Gettysburg Address (1863)
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860)
- Herman Melville, “Shiloh: A Requiem” (1866)
- Marianne Moore, “The Student” (1932)
- Esther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934) and Personal Adventures in Race Relations (1946)
- Tracy K. Smith, “Declaration” (2018)
- Sojourner Truth, “I am a Woman’s Rights” (1851)
- Frances Ellen Watkins, “Bury Me in a Free Land” (1858)
- Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773)
- E.B. White, On Freedom and Democracy (1940, 1943)
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself: #51, #52” (1855, 1867), “I Hear America Singing” (1860), “O, Captain! My Captain!” (1865)
Other poems from the Hirsch book (only for final essays)
- John Ashberry, “Soonest Mended”
- Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
- Sterling A. Brown, “Southern Road”
- Julia de Burgos, “Farewell in Welfare Island”
- Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”
- Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”
- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
- Allen Ginsberg, “America”
- Louise Gluck, “Retreating Wind”
- Michael S. Harper, “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”
- Anthony Hecht, “More Light! More Light!”
- Garrett Hongo, “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku”
- Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues”
- Denise Levertov, “O Taste and See”
- Philip Levine, “To Cipriano in the Wind”
- Amy Lowell, “Madonna of the Evening Flowers”
- Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
- Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
- Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter”
- Adrienne Rich, “XIII (Dedications)”
- Edward Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”
- Theodore Roethke, “Cuttings”
- Muriel Rukeyser, ” St. Roach”
- Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
- C.K. Williams, “My Mother’s Lips”
- William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
- James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”