How can annotating a poem lead to interesting literary criticism?
I recently required my literature students to analyze a pair of poems for an exam. They were to write out the poems by hand and then annotate these as a step in their analysis. Those annotations typically took one of two forms:
- Simple identification of ideas or formal elements
- Attempts at interpreting or synthesizing
The first of these is a very primary level of analysis and reflects one's ability to understand and represent the content (paraphrase) or to identify basic components of literary form (character, setting, diction, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, repetition, figures of speech, etc.). The trick is to move from the first to the second of these levels (on the way to more developed literary arguments). Here are some examples.
