English 304 Projects and Assignments (may be adjusted with notice)

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Paper One:

The first paper will be just over two double-spaced pages long, approximately 700 words, typed, with your name, date, course number and a short, relatively uncreative title for the paper at the top of the first page.  Please use a parenthetical method of citation similar to that described in the MLA Handbook to cite poems by line number and prose works by page number.  The paper is due in class on 29 September.

In "Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth outlines a creative process that incorporates memory, imagination, cognition, emotion and ethics.  That process is revealed though Wordsworth's use of content and form.  In several of his other works, he demonstrates the "Tintern Abbey" process at work.  In later works, however, he varies the process.  In still later works, he questions the validity of the process altogether, and that questioning is further indicated in his formal practices (that is, his choice of formal, poetic devices such as genre, stanzaic structure, figurative language, imagery, diction and meter).

Your assignment is to discuss the development of and changes to the "Tintern Abbey" process from "Tintern Abbey" through "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" to "Elegiac Stanzas."  Your discussion of "Tintern Abbey" should be very brief and concise.  Your discussions of "Intimations Ode" and "Elegiac Stanzas" should be more thorough.  Please attend to similarities and differences in both content and form from one poem to the next to the next and refer back periodically to "Tintern Abbey" as the basis of your investigation of how the later poems retain and/or vary the process and poetic technique.