Critical Response Essay #2

Using “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, construct a comparison and contrast argumentative essay in which you examine how each author uses one of the following themes:
Time
Carpe diem (“Seize the day”)
Love vs. Lust
Life and death
Write an analytical comparison and contrast essay on one of the following pairs of poems. Note: you need to create an argument that contains a framework for comparing them. You can do so by theme, a literary device, motif, etc.

Other ideas to consider when choosing a topic:

What about the genders of the characters that affect your reading? (Gender Study)
Do any of the events of the author’s life seem relevant to the work? (Biographic Criticism)
Do the characters seem to display behaviors that modern psychologists would find interesting? (Psychoanalytic Criticism)
Are any of the items in the text symbolic? (Semiotics)
How does class or level of wealth affect what the narrator or characters are acting on? (Marxist Criticism)
How do you think this particular reading assignment fits into its period of time? (Historical Literary Criticism)
How does the race of the characters or author come into the narrative? (African American Literary Criticism, Ethnic Criticism)
In what significant ways can we expect readers to react to this work? (Reader Response)

Remember that it all rests on an argument and your argument requires a thesis statement

The thesis sentence is, by far, the most important sentence in the paper. The goal of this sentence is to outline for the reader what the argument of the paper will be. It most often is found as the last sentence of the first paragraph and holds such an important place in your paper that you should expect that a poor thesis statement will lead to a poor grade. The thesis statement is a foundation for the argument and should attempt to succinctly and clearly let the reader know what the paper is going to be about. A good rule of thumb when writing either a critical response paper or a research paper is to make sure that every sentence in the paper is in some way continuing to prove the argument first established by the thesis.

What format and length should the essay be?

Additional Tips

Present a clear thesis statement in your Introduction that establishes your focus—it should be a claim that your essay will prove. Aim to select a thesis that is not utterly obvious; you may want to conceive of your thesis as a declarative statement that a sophisticated reader could find disagreeable.
Titles of short stories and poems in quotation marks; titles of novels and longer works should be underlined or italicized.
Discuss literature in the historical present tense—not the past tense. Here are some examples: Twain portrays the Mississippi river and reveals the hypocrisy of Southern Christianity. Or, Jim teaches Huck a valuable lesson about friendship.
When quoting, please include the page number from our anthology in parentheses. Note that the parentheses go before the period or comma. Here’s an example: According to the narrator, “There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, nor ever will” (436).