Advanced Placement Research Paper Project
(In Three Parts)

The adventure begins! Your challenge is to write a paper that demonstrates that you have reflected and savored the writing experience. Your comparison can encompass dominant literary aspects such as style, theme, plot development, imagery, tone, or humor of two works. Additionally, you will understand the importance of revision and conversion of a formal essay into a documented research paper.

Part I The Rough Draft 18 November 2010

1. Select your poet and search for his or her main influence. Read and interpret a variety of poems keeping the list of prompts in mind as you search for the wisest decisions that best befits your selections.

2. You will be constructing a comparison/contrast essay from your selections. This will serve as your rough draft and your first reach into the free-response poetry analysis question of the AP Exam.

3. Bring your poems and your TYPED prompt to class for the timed writing rough draft. After the 40-minute timed essay has concluded, I will quickly check your quantity, as you will be taking this essay home for serious revision. All to be turned in with the Formal Essay.

Part II The Formal Essay 21 November 2010

1. You will now use what you have composed in class as a starting point in the formal writing process. You may use what you have composed in class as a starting point or completely refresh your approach if you feel you can do a better job with a different thesis or possibly a different work. You may only change one of the poems, however. (same poet of course)

2. When you turn in your masterpiece 9, you must include copies of the primary sources (placed behind your essay). You must also include textual evidence and textual references throughout your work.

3. Your paper must be typewritten 12 pt. Times New Roman double-spaced throughout.

4. There is a five hundred word minimum requirement on length.

Part III The Research Paper 14-16 December 2010

Body 4-5 pages—Times New Roman; 12 point

Works Cited: two secondary sources per poem as a minimum.

Secondary Source considerations include biographical, historical, social, and philosophical influence. An example: “The grizzly imagery of WWI trench warfare fuels Wilfred Owen’s ridicule of early 20th century England within “Dulce et Decorum Est” as the speaker watches in paralyzed horror his fellow comrade die from mustard gas (citation par. #1). Within this example evidence of WWI and mustard gas have been paraphrased and cited to help develop the student’s literary assertion.

1. Documentation will follow the MLA Style Sheet guidelines. Be aware that the style sheet has changed.

2. Grading will be based on quality of content as well as presentation. “Greater Expectations” will apply. Remember that you lose a letter-grade for faulty sentences (fragments, run-ons, and comma splices), use of 2nd person, contractions, needless parenthetical expressions (I think, I feel, I believe, It seems to me, etc.).

3. Research papers will be returned second semester.

The formal essay and the research paper must be submitted to turnitin.com. You will gather all steps to this process—poems, prompt, timed writing rough draft, Formal Essay, and Final Research Paper along with all highlighted secondary sources and online verification—in pocketed folder on your final due date.

The General Prologue
Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Modern Translation:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all
And bathed every vein in liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has with his sweet breath,
Filled again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and leaves, and the young sun
His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in distant lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury went,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

50 British Poets that have stood the test of TIME

1. A.E. Housman


2. Alexander Pope


3. Alfred Tennyson


4. Andrew Marvell


5. Anne Bronte


6. Ben Johnson


7. Charlotte Bronte


8. Christina Rossetti


9. Christopher Marlowe


10. D.H. Lawrence


11. Dante Gabriel Rossetti


12. Dylan Thomas


13. Edmund Spenser


14. Elizabeth Browning


15. Emily Bronte


16. Ezra Pound


17. Francis Bacon


18. George Elliot


19. George Herbert


20. John Betjeman


21. John Clare


22. John Donne


23. John Dryden


24. John Keats


25. John Milton


26. Jonathan Swift


27. Mathew Arnold


28. Oscar Wilde


29. Percy Shelley


30. Phillip Larkin


31. Richard Lovelace


32. Robert Browning


33. Robert Burns


34. Robert Graves


35. Robert Herrick


36. Rudyard Kipling


37. Samuel Johnson


38. Samuel Taylor Coleridge


39. Sir Phillip Sidney


40. Sir Walter Scott


41. T.S. Elliot


42. Ted Hughes


43. Thomas Hardy


44. Thomas Moore


45. W.H. Auden


46. Wilfred Owen


47. William Blake


48. William Butler Yeats


49. William Shakespeare


50. William Wordsworth