Summer Poetry Assignment

Exciting news, AP Literature and Composition has its very own summer assignment (in addition to the required reading).  Please go to the course web page to download the three documents (including a sample/model) necessary to complete the assignment.

Reading and Understanding a Poem

Fridge Poetry

From the University of Wisconsin--Madison:


Some people like poetry.  Many people fear poetry.  But they fear it for the wrong reasons because it is difficult to understand.  But poetry is not designed to instantly give up its meaning like a novel or a magazine article. Poems are highly compressed works of literature.  Meaning that a lot of meaning is packed into as little a space as possible.  Understanding a poem requires careful reading and re-reading to extract that meaning from the carefully structured words.


This site from the University of Wisconsin's Writing Center provides a good approach to reading and understanding poetry. Here is a summary of their approach:

Poem Analysis Guide:

i. Read a poem with pencil in hand. Jot down questions.ii. Read a poem several times.  Read it aloud at least once.

1. Who is the poem’s author?  What are his birth and death (if applicable) years?
2. What is the author’s country of origin?
3. Are there any difficult words?  If so, look them up and record them.
4. Consider the title carefully.  
1. What is it implying?  
2. How does it connect to the poem?
5. What is the poem's subject and situation?
1. Who is talking?  To whom are they talking?
2. What are the poem's circumstances?  What happened in the poem?
3. Is something tangible being described?  Something intangible?
6. What figurative language, if any, is used?
1. Is the poem built upon a comparison or analogy?  
2. A simile or metaphor?  
7. What is the author's attitude toward the subject of the poem?
8. Are there divisions within the poem?  
1. How is the poem ordered?
2. Are there stanzas?  What size?
9. Is there any consistent pattern of words?  Look for examples of an author's intentional word choice.  Why did they choose one word over another?
10. Ask yourself the following question about the poem, "So what?"  What purpose does the poem have?  

Intro to Literary Theory

Comic from XKCD:


AP English Lit is mainly a survey of British (and some European) literature.  What that means is that we will be engaging in literary criticism about major works of literature from England.  The course is a "survey" because it covers select works of literature from England and those works are selected from the most influential and periods of British lit.


The term "literary criticism" is somewhat harder to define.  Google tells me that it is "The art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of literary works."  Which is true, but doesn't capture the complexity of the field.


The Purdue "Online Writing Lab" (OWL) provides a more complete overview  of literary theory at this link.  We will be using some of these approaches to analyze the works that we will be reading in AP Lit.


A brief timeline (from OWL) of the major fields of literary theory can be found inside this post.

What's the difference between Lit and Lang?

One of the questions we get most in the English department is "what's the difference between AP English Literature and Composition and AP English Language and Composition?


The short answer is that AP Lit focuses mainly on analyzing fiction and drama, and that AP Lang focuses mainly on analyzing non-fiction and on making effective arguments.


The longer answer comes in when you ask about the AP English exams and what the difference is between the AP English exams and the exams for almost every other subject?