Midterm review session: 7 March, 7 to 8:30 pm, 6172 HCW

On Tuesday, March 7th from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, I will be in Helen C. White 6172 (directly across from the Writing Center on the sixth floor of HCW) to answer any questions you have about the work for which you are answerable on the midterm.

This review session is, of course, optional.

I will not be preparing a lesson -- this is not, in effect, an extra class: instead, you need to come with questions and with topics you'd like to discuss or hear discussed. This means that you will need to have begun reviewing before our session on Tuesday night. Do not use this review session as a place to begin your review.

Studying for the midterm

You might already all know this by now, but it's important that I tell you this: Literature exams are not the sorts of things for which you can easily cram. What should you study, and how? Here's the process I recommend:

1. Begin by reviewing the definitions of modernism and modernity Prof. Wolfe has been giving us this semester, particularly those to which he has returned frequently. Write out a short list for yourself of the four or five things that best define modernism.
2. Begin reviewing the passages Prof. Wolfe has covered in lecture, starting with the text you remember least. For most of you, I imagine this will be As I Lay Dying.
   1. Identify (from lecture and discussion notes, and from selective rereading) the text's three major themes.
   2. Ask yourself: how do these textual themes connect to the larger themes of modernism?
   3. If you were Prof. Wolfe, which two short passages from this text would you most likely put on the midterm? (Your best bet here is to pick passages that best reveal or nuance the themes.)
   4. How does each of these passages reveal the themes of the text?
3. Repeat steps a through d for each author we've studied.
4. Begin thinking comparatively: what themes and styles do Faulkner and Hemingway have in common? Faulkner and Woolf? How is Eliot's poetry like Stevens's?
5. You might even think about comparisons between poetry and prose: how are Eliot and Woolf alike? Stevens and Faulkner?
6. This is the important part: How do the authors you are comparing offer interestingly different perspectives on one of the main problems of modernism or modernity?

We will do some of this in class on Friday, but only a small portion of what you will need to have prepared to do well on the midterm. The particular challenge of this exam will be the essay question, in which you will need to write articulately not only about two authors, but must also write articulately about one or more of the basic problems of modernity.

I will run a review session -- completely optional -- next Tuesday. The exact time and location will be announced when I have them. Until then, as always, please email me with any questions you have.

Hebdomadal 5: Diving into Dalloway (Updated 3/2)

A quick warning: I probably won't be getting your response to this hebdomadal back to you at all speedily, what with your first essays and midterms on my plate. Please be patient with me...

Topic 1: The Crisis of Intimacy

Prof. Wolfe has mentioned twice, now, that modernity is marked by a "crisis of intimacy." What does the "crisis of intimacy" mean psychologically to characters in Modernist fiction? Pick apart a paragraph from a dialogue between Peter and Clarissa (e.g. pp. 40 to 48, but really any paragraph in which one of them thinks about the other will work): how does this paragraph help reveal what the crisis of intimacy feels like to those suffering it?

You might think specifically about the ways Mrs Dalloway manifests the crisis of intimacy as a problem of reconciling theoretical and practical responses to the Freudian problems Prof. Wolfe has been raising this week.

Topic 1½: Failures of Communication, Crises of Intimacy

You might consider this crisis of intimacy in terms of the failures of communication we studied last week in our reading of In Our Time. Connect one of Hemingway's failed love stories ("The End of Something" or "The Cat in the Rain" or "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot") to the Peter-Clarissa story. How is the communication between Hemingway's characters different from the communication between Woolf's characters? How does Hemingway depict the failure of intimacy? How does Woolf? What are the important differences in the two authors' discussions of communication and intimacy?

You might, alternatively, look at Richard's meditation on loving his wife (beginning on p. 115): how does he simplify or nuance problems of communication in this sequence?

Topic 2: Symbols, Narration, and Realism

Much of Mrs Dalloway is riddled with symbolism, often overt symbolism which would seem to undermine the apparent realism of the text. Pick a paragraph that foregrounds symbolic meaning (e.g. the paragraph running from pp. 33-4, beginning "Sally's power was amazing...") and, working closely with that paragraph, address this question: In what ways, and why, is Woolf intermixing realistic stories with poetic invention? You might particularly consider the different positions the narrator takes in the passage you analyze.

Here's one way of approaching this question: Sir William Bradshaw remarks that one of Septimus's symptoms is a propensity to "attach[] meanings to words of a symbolical kind" (96). What is the particular danger in thus "attaching meanings"? What does it mean that Woolf, through Bradshaw, seems to be associating our reading practice -- in which we very much attach meanings to words of a symbolical kind -- to severe mental illness?

A persuasive translation of "Senta Rinaldi. Senta."

Senta: Imperative of sentire, "to hear, to feel."

"Now hear this, Rinaldi. Listen up."

Grazie, Marcy.

A quick note on what to cite

You do not need to give bibliographic citation information for the primary text(s) with which you are working, although I do ask you to give line and page numbers wherever you quote or paraphrase from the text.

However, if you refer to any outside source for factual or interpretive information - even to something as benign as Wikipedia - I really need to see a citation. Thankfully, citing Wikipedia is easy: travel to our Writing Center's MLA handbook page and check out its listing of electronic sources; look under "Article in an online encyclopedia."

This also goes for lectures: if you are getting concrete, factual information or something that sounds like it could be an independent interpretation from one of Prof. Wolfe's lectures, that should be cited as well. This gets into slightly trickier territory: there are plenty of things Prof. Wolfe has said - for example, his definition of modernity - which you really don't need to cite because he is, in these cases, simply sharing received knowledge with you.

However, when Prof. Wolfe says "I am going to make the argument that" (for example) "As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's satiric representation of an epic quest transplanted into the modern world," that is a claim which is not received knowledge and which, if you choose to treat it as plain fact, you will need to cite.

To simplify: facts (authors' birthdates, definitions of terms, historical backgrounds) and characterizations (the meaning of modernity and modernism, Hemingway's style) do not need to be cited. Conjectures and arguments do.

How do you cite a lecture? Consult the Writing Center's guide to citing non-print sources; replace "Interview" with "Lecture." Voilá!

Essay 1: Some notes on formatting

Many of you have asked about how I want your first essay formatted. Here is basically what I'm looking for:

• 1" margins on all sides
• 12 point Times New Roman text
• Double spaced
• Quotations longer than 4 lines indented 1"
• Parenthetical citations in MLA style (line numbers for poems, page numbers for novels; exception: our edition of "Prufrock" doesn't have line numbers, so page numbers will have to do)
• Bibliographic citations also in MLA style, only for non-class texts

One last note: please name your paper file as follows: LastName 1.doc; for example, if I were turning in a paper I would send it as Shapiro 1.doc.

Traveling, Journeying, Questing, and Pilgrimage...ing

I list this smaller question under the umbrella of the first essay topic:

Distinguish traveling from journeying from questing; which does this text narrate? Why?

In looking over a half dozen approaches to this essay, I've found that I probably presented this question poorly. I'm not asking you to define all three terms in your essay; instead, I'm asking you to think carefully about the way the text characterizes the motivation for and goal of travel.

Now, if you're comparing "The Waste Land" to "Sailing to Byzantium," you might want to carefully distinguish one as quest or pilgrimage from the other as journey. All I'm saying here is that if you are writing exclusively about "The Waste Land" you might not need to define journey and travel if you're most interested in the poem as quest.

Hebdomadal 4

Topic 1: A Tantalizing Preview

Choose the essay topic you intend to pursue, and write out a sophisticated thesis statement or thesis question. (It's perfectly fair to pose your project in terms of a strong, analytical question: "To what end does Faulkner incorporate animal imagery into Vardaman's and Darl's narratives? In particular, do the images of fish, horse, and vulture underscore or undermine the mythic quest narrative of As I Lay Dying?")

For whatever remains of your 250 to 500 words, outline how your essay will pursue this thesis or this question. On what short section of the text will you concentrate? What details do you see in that section, and how do you anticipate associating those details with your larger argument? If you've begun to develop an outline, I invite you to share it.

However, bear in mind that your hebdomadal must demonstrate close reading and analysis and cannot simply be disconnected meditations on your topic.

Are you a little unsure what a college-level literary analysis essay looks like? Here's the full text of a fantastic paper I received last semester. Pay particular attention to its thesis statement: notice how it builds from a close reading of a single textual symbol (a mirror in Middlemarch) to a foundation for analyzing the text in a larger sense.

Topic 2: Thirteen Ways of Reading Wallace Stevens

You've probably at least heard of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which we are sadly not reading this semester. However, we can always channel its spirit!

Pick one of the Stevens poems we are reading for class this week ("Sunday Morning" is probably ideal for this) and write thirteen short claims you can make about the poem. Example: The equation of trees with serafin and the mention of the "heavenly fellowship" of the druids at the end of "Sunday Morning" suggests not that Stevens is abnegating Christian spirituality but rather that he is displacing the focus of worship from an abstract God to a material Earth. In other words, mix a bit of close reading in with a bit of analysis, and do it thirteen times just so you can play with different ways of approaching the poem without having to worry as much about obsessively close reading or forming a single, fluid argument.

Timeline: Modernism

1873: Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance
1889: Yeats, "The Stolen Child"
1893: Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," "Who Goes With Fergus"
1914: Yeats, "September 1913"
1917: Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
1921: Yeats, "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming"
1922: Eliot, "The Waste Land"
1923: Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Snow Man," "Sunday Morning," "Tea at the Palace of Hoon"
1925: Hemingway, In Our Time; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
1928: Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
1930: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
1939: Yeats, "Long-legged Fly"
1942: Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry," "The Poems of Our Climate"
1954: Stevens, "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself" (posthumously)

Essay 1 Topic

Note that the sign-up sheet for conferring with me about your first essay is down below. Hours and hours are still available!

Also: a link to the Essay 1 Assignment in case you have lost yours or just want a convenient digital copy.

More model hebdos! (Updated 2/13)

Are you still a little uncomfortable putting together close reading and analysis in under a page? Ellie (313) offers this excellent demonstration of how to look at a text closely and critically while still offering up a larger reading of why those details are important. Notice that she begins with what Prof. Wolfe was saying in lecture about the relationship between the Romantics and the Modernists, and observes differences between these movements in everything from the details of the words that are used to the larger intent of the poem. This is good stuff.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep
-from “The Stolen Child”

Though it could be said that Yeats’s earlier works had echoes of romanticism, his poems were definitely different from the romantic poets’ works. William Butler Yeats, in the second stanza of “The Stolen Child,” employs long alliterations and assonances with deceptive language to caution one from running to nature to escape
reality.

The alliteration and assonance in the second stanza do not last only a line, but continue for the whole stanza. The chief alliteration of the stanza would involve the words “Where the wave,” “Weaving,” and “While the world.” The letter “w” is the first letter of many question words. Repeating this sound in the stanza tells one the question the speaker of the poem. The speaker claims that if the child follows the fairy he/she will live a carefree life “While the world is full of troubles.” The alliteration of the “w,” however, urges one to doubt the existence of a place where “dim grey sands” are made “light.” Romantics trust nature to restore them, but Yeats warns one not to completely rely on nature.

The misleading diction is symbolic of Yeats’s attitude toward Romanticism. The speaker tells the child to go “Where the wave of moonlight glosses/ The dim grey sands with light.” Sand is crumbly and rough representing the world at this time. At first, it seems like nature will smooth out, or “gloss” this sand and brighten the world with the “moonlight.” One should remember, however, that the moon is not as dependable as the sun. The sun can be counted on to rise everyday and provide light. The moon, though, may rise every night, but it cannot always be seen. A new moon would leave these sands a “dim grey.” The word “gloss” also alludes to the deceptive comfort of nature. A gloss does not smooth something, it only hides the roughness. The sand may look smooth in the “moonlight,” but it is still sand and will always be rough. Words like “wave,” “Weaving,” and “To and fro” suggest something that is not constant, but oscillates. Something that wavers can not be depended on. Nature appears like a perfect escape from city life, but life is rough wherever one resides.

Matt (314) offers this example of a comparison essay. Notice that he compares not surface details of these two poems but rather looks for tonal variation. (One quibble: Matt could have gone on to explain how this difference in the poems' tone, etc., reveals important changes in Yeats's poetic outlook.)

William Butler Yeat’s writing can easily be seen as substantially diverse when comparing specific time periods in his life. This is evident from the smallest detail to the most general concept. A prime comparison of this gamut is visible when contrasting an earlier piece such as “The Lake At Innisfree” with a later work like “September 1913.”

With “Innisfree,” Yeats has created a beautifully simple piece that is fluid in both its poetic structure and subject matter. The poem keeps a reoccurring rhyme scheme (ABAB CDCD EFEF), making it easy and painless for the reader to digest. Yeats avoids giving “Innisfree” any kind of meter, but with his continuous use of end stoppage, this does anything but inhibit the poems strength. It is also broken up into short stanzas that add to the light, digestible feel of the poem. The fluidity of the piece is also reinforced by various examples of alliteration throughout (“lake...lapping...low”).

“September 1913,” on the other hand, contains poetic structure that is much more heavy and harder to swallow than the previous example. Although it contains a rhyme scheme that is similar “Innisfree,” this poem uses an iambic pentameter meter scheme, giving the piece a rigid and structured. The stanza length is has been heavily increased here, and more enjambment has been utilized, stripping each line of satisfying closure and leaving the reader feeling tense.

The images and themes the respective pieces create are also incredibly different. Innisfree’s main theme revolves around nature, and various word choices, such as the repetition of “peace” and “heart.” Turning away from the modernists of his time, Yeats chooses to disregard the modern world and yearn for a world without other humans. Although the few lines regarding modernism are bleak and “grey,” the poem contains much hope and reoccurring images of light and life.

“September,” once again, differs from its counterpart. Images of life and hope seen in “Innisfree” are opposed here with various references to death and pessimism. Where in “Innisfree,” Yeats can escape the daily grind and return to the lake, the voice of “September” has absolutely no hope. The piece is much more accusatory in that it uses the “you” form and is aggressive towards the reader. A grave tone also paints itself across all of the piece, with ample cemetery and religious references.

Essay 1 Conference Sign-up Sheet (Updated 2/18)

I urge you all to visit me during my office hours in the coming week and a half to talk through your first essay. Meeting with me does not automatically boost your grade, but listening to and following my advice can have a reasonably positive effect =)

Some quick rules:

• Read over the essay assignment carefully and come in with a topic selected;
• Choose the text you think you are going to write about, and reread it carefully with an eye to what you might write in your essay;
• Jot out half a page of notes, brainstorming somewhat for yourself the angle you think you might take;
• Come in with one or two specific questions for me to answer.

I am looking for you to lead this meeting, so we avoid the unpleasant situation where you're not entirely sure what you want to do and I end up talking with you for fifteen minutes about some ideas you ultimately never pursue.

Here's how these signups work: email me if there is a blank slot listed below that you want to take and, if it's still free, I'll email you back letting you know that you're signed up. If none of these times work for you, please email me so we can work out an alternate time.

All conferences take place at the Steep & Brew on State Street.

Tuesday February 14:
1:30 pm - Greta H.
1:50 - Katie H.
2:10 -
2:30 -
2:50 -
3:10 -
3:30 -
3:50 -
4:10 -

Wednesday February 15:
11:00 - Steph P.
11:20 - Myla D.
11:40 -
12:00 pm - Liz P.
12:20 - Sarah D.
12:40 - John O.

Monday 20 February (New!)
3:30 pm - James G.
3:50 - Alex A.
4:10 -
4:30 - Sebastian C.
4:50 - Jenna S.
5:10 -
5:30 -

Tuesday 21 February:
1:40 pm -
2:00 - Mike P.
2:20 - Steph P.
2:40 - Samantha U.
3:00 - Leanne H.
3:20 - Matt F.
3:40 - Julie E.
4:00 - Keith N.
4:20 - Beth W.
4:40 - Brandy H.

Three Nobel Prize acceptance speeches

If you are looking for a way to verbalize differences between Faulkner, Eliot, and Yeats, you might find their Nobel Prize speeches interesting (although not necessarily reliable) encapsulations of their poetic philosophies.

• Yeats (1923): "In the country you are alone with your own violence, your own heaviness, and with the common tragedy of life, and if you have any artistic capacity you desire beautiful emotion; and, certain that the seasons will be the same always, care not how fantastic its expression."
• Eliot (1948): "I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential."
• Faulkner (1950): "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?"

From Innisfree to Ballylee: sights of Sligo and Coole

The Flickrists Bunnygoth and Irelandseye have a number of stunning pictures of our favorite Lake Isle - the pictures are copywritten, so I can't post them directly. You might, however, turn your eyes towards these views of the mainland from the lake isle, the sun streaming in between the isle's pines, and this unbelieveable waterfall. Honestly, it all looks like something out of a theme park or a movie: it's not hard to see how the setting motivated Yeats's Thoreauvian dream.

Note also the preponderance of geese: the wild geese of Yeats's writing recall the revolutionaries who fled Ireland as the British government began cracking down on Irish resistance, but they have a literal parallel in the geese of County Sligo.


A picture from Coole Park, by Davers. Yeats spent his later life in Coole County, in a castle he called Thoor Ballylee:

Photo by flipsockgrrl. The titles of two volumes of poetry from this period - The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and The Tower (1928) - recall these sights.

Hebdomadal 3

Oh, Yeats! Quite the change from reading Eliot, wouldn't you say?

Prof. Wolfe indicated today that Yeats's early poems are, generalizing slightly, interested in aesthetic experience and that his later poems are concerned with politics. These themes are fairly huge, however, and leave us with a lot of questions:

• how do these themes manifest themselves in the nuances of a poem's form and rhetoric?
• how does individual poems interact with these huge themes?
• how do poems--even within the same period--differ from one another in the way they tackle these themes?

The general goal for this week's hebdomadals is to ask you to explore how individual poems can fit into much larger poetic structures and intentions. I didn't want to trap you into one specific way of tackling this goal, so here are a few different approaches:

Topic 1: On Scansion & Symbolism

Your goal here is to explore how a close formal and rhetorical reading of a poem helps you identify the subtleties of a poem's theme.

Choose a stanza that Prof. Wolfe hasn't covered too closely in lecture & copy it out at the beginning of your hebdomadal. In an organized argument, describe how this stanza's formal and rhetorical nuances reveal the poem's interaction with Yeats's larger theme from this period.

Formally, you will want to look at the stanza's rhyme and meter, instances of alliteration and assonance and of enjambment and end-stopping. Rhetorically, look for symbols and symbolic language in all its manifestations, particularly metaphor and metonymy.

Yes, this is a somewhat complicated topic for a short response paper; however! it is setting you up to write a paper on Yeats.

Topic 2: Yeats vs. Yeats

Rather than keep the focus narrowly on a few lines from a single poem, choose two poems--one from Tuesday's reading assignment and one from Thursday's--and compare them to one another both in terms of formal ((rhyme, meter, alliteration/assonance, enjambment/end-stoppage) and rhetorical (word choice, symbolism, metaphor) details and in terms of what the poems are about.

One quick rule: don't look anything up! If you are writing this hebdomadal before Thursday or if Prof. Wolfe doesn't cover this in lecture, don't worry about what happened in September 1913 or on Easter, 1916: focus on the poems themselves. Yeats is an intensely autobiographical poet, and we could spend the entire week trying to correlate his poems to his life but we wouldn't understand his poetry any better; and the point--and the pleasure--is the poetry.

Lastly: try to put your reading together as a structured argument; this doesn't mean you need a formal thesis statement or a businesslike tone, but try to keep each paragraph focused on a single idea, and allow your ideas to lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Topic 3: Yeats vs. Eliot

(You can guess where this is going.) Pick one of these pairs of poems!

1. Yeats's "September 1913" (1914) and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
2. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1921) and Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922)

Okay, these are huge poems--even Yeats's, which are shorter, are conceptually massive. To keep things simple, choose a small chunk from each poem and characterize the differences in their (say it with me now) formal and rhetorical features.

Now for the fun part: remembering the larger themes Prof. Wolfe has sketched out for these poets and their work, why are these poems so different formally and rhetorically? Or, even more fun, if they're similar then why are they so similar?

Your goal here is to be able to say--if you were writing, say, a 3- to 5-page essay on this topic--how the poet's differences in style mirror the difference in the way they are approaching poetry as a genre. This is huge! This is awesome! If you can get to the point where you can move from comparisons of poets' styles to comparisons of poets' larger aesthetic claims, you are made.

Please, please let me know if you have any questions about this business. We're beginning to bite into the meat of the semester, and I want to hear how you're doing.

Remember, I'm sitting at Steep & Brew on Tuesday afternoons, just twiddling my thumbs and hoping one of you fine folks with drop in to talk about the aestheticist tradition and modern distopias and what music I should be listening to now that I'm just about Rachel Stevens'd out.

Last chance(s) to take Literary Analysis: No Problem!

The fabulous folks at the Writing Center pass along this message:

Students, it's not too late to get some help with your Intro to Lit papers. Check out this Writing Center class:

Literary Analysis: No Problem
This two-session class focuses on writing a critical analysis assigned in beginning literature courses. In this mini-class, you'll

• explore organizational strategies that work best in writing papers about literature
• look at strategies for doing a close reading
• find ways to make a comparison paper seamless
• examine critical strategies as well as organizational ones
  

Even if you missed the first session, you're welcome to attend the second. (A note from Mike: it's ideal for you to attend the full complement - the first session and then the second. The class is set up to discuss general principles of literary analysis essays on the first day and then to workshop students' sample essays on the second. It's a pretty awesome setup, and if you can fit both into your schedule that's the best way to get a lot of information quickly.)

Offered at these dates and times:

• Tuesdays, second session on Feb. 7, 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.(Sec. 1)
• Wednesdays, second session on Feb. 8, 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. (Sec. 2)
• Thursdays, second session on Feb. 9, 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. (Sec. 3)
• Mondays, second session on Feb. 13, 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. (Sec. 4)
• Fridays, Feb. 10 & 17, 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Sec. 5)
• Tuesday & Thursday, Feb. 14 & 16, 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. (Sec. 6)

Please register. It's easy!
Register online 24 hours a day at www.wisc.edu/writing (click on classes)

And just a reminder that for those looking for someone to help critique their papers, the Writing Center offers individual conferences with experienced writing instructors. Call 263-1992 to make an appointment!

The UW-Madison Writing Center, 6171 Helen C. White Hall
www.wisc.edu/writing

The sounds of modernism

Did you ever want to carry important modern poets in your pocket? Now you can!

Eliot's reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is available here, in the Salon audio archives as an .mp3 file. His HarperAudio reading of "The Waste Land" is available here in the archives of the Internet Multicasting Services as a set of .au files. (If you want to convert .au to .mp3, Download.com has a good 30-day demo of AudioConverter 5.5.2.)

All the Eliot file have advertising-ish blurbs at the beginning and/or end, so be forewarned. I wonder what Eliot would have thought about his poetry being used to sell Lexuses?

And here is a short .m4a of Yeats reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

Some details to bear in mind as you write your hebdomadals

I really appreciate the work you all have been putting into writing weekly responses to class reading and lecture, and I've enjoyed the experience of getting to know how you are responding to a text and planning my lessons appropriately! However, looking over some of the hebdomadals I have received so far this week, I've noticed a couple prevalent problems. If you are writing a hebdomadal tonight for class tomorrow, you might look to avoid these problems.

1. When you quote verse, quote it as verse: this means preserving the line breaks, capitalization, and, if possible, indentation of the original. In a casual-organized response like these hebdomadals it's okay--even advisable--for you to separate every multi-line quotation of a poem from your main text. However, if you would like to incorporate the verse into the main body of your writing, do so thusly: "Twit twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc'd. / Tereu" (ll. 203-6). The /'s separate lines of the poem, and the ll. at the end means "quoted from the following lines." (Verse is cited by line number, prose by page number.) This is an important detail because you should be looking at how Eliot uses line breaks.
2. Eliot has one l, one t. Oddly enough, this same misspelling arose last semester in regard to George Eliot.
3. On that note: hebdomadal. The hebdomodel business was a pun, and perhaps it is too early in the semester for puns.
4. Spelling isn't a big deal--honestly, misspelling is likelier to make me smile than to make me frustrated--but analysis is another matter entirely. Many of the hebdomadals I have seen this week focus on close reading (or even lecture summary) to the exclusion of considering how that close reading helps answer questions the lecturers have posed. Make sure that at least your last two sentences--if not also your first two sentences--tie your close reading to one of the big questions Aaron and Prof. Wolfe have raised this week.
5. Every word of these hebdomadals is precious: while I have no objection to hearing, in class, about your emotional response to these poems, I'm not sure a written response is the place to describe why and how much you like Eliot's style. (There are exceptions to this: I've received at least one strong hebdomadal this week that ties the author's response to "The Love Song" to Prufrock's preoccupation with being liked. Still, if you choose to write about your personal response please ensure your response ties into a larger claim you are making.)

Reading these second-week hebdomadals I've become a little afraid that I haven't adequately communicated what I am looking for in them--if you have any questions at all about my expectations, I urge you to email me or even to raise the question in class. I'm not trying to be mysterious or cruel with these hebdomadals, but I understand that it's not a style of writing with which you folks are likely to be familiar, and I want to help!