writing a poetry research paper

EH -- Researching Poems: Strategies for Poetry Research

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Page Overview

This page addresses the research process -- the things that should be done before the actual writing of the paper -- and strategies for engaging in the process.  Although this LibGuide focuses on researching poems or poetry, this particular page is more general in scope and is applicable to most lower-division college research assignments.

Before You Begin

Before beginning any research process, first be absolutely sure you know the requirements of the assignment.  Things such as  

• the date the completed project is due 
• the due dates of any intermediate assignments, like turning in a working bibliography or notes
• the length requirement (minimum word count), if any 
• the minimum number and types (for example, books or articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals) of sources required

These formal requirements are as much a part of the assignment as the paper itself.  They form the box into which you must fit your work.  Do not take them lightly.

When possible, it is helpful to subdivide the overall research process into phases, a tactic which

• makes the idea of research less intimidating because you are dealing with sections at a time rather than the whole process
• makes the process easier to manage
• gives a sense of accomplishment as you move from one phase to the next

Characteristics of a Well-written Paper

Although there are many details that must be given attention in writing a research paper, there are three major criteria which must be met.  A well-written paper is

• Unified:  the paper has only one major idea; or, if it seeks to address multiple points, one point is given priority and the others are subordinated to it.
• Coherent: the body of the paper presents its contents in a logical order easy for readers to follow; use of transitional phrases (in addition, because of this, therefore, etc.) between paragraphs and sentences is important.
• Complete:  the paper delivers on everything it promises and does not leave questions in the mind of the reader; everything mentioned in the introduction is discussed somewhere in the paper; the conclusion does not introduce new ideas or anything not already addressed in the paper.

Basic Research Strategy

• How to Research From Pellissippi State Community College Libraries: discusses the principal components of a simple search strategy.
• Basic Research Strategies From Nassau Community College: a start-up guide for college level research that supplements the information in the preceding link. Tabs two, three, and four plus the Web Evaluation tab are the most useful for JSU students. As with any LibGuide originating from another campus, care must be taken to recognize the information which is applicable generally from that which applies solely to the Guide's home campus. .
• Information Literacy Tutorial From Nassau Community College: an elaboration on the material covered in the preceding link (also from NCC) which discusses that material in greater depth. The quizzes and surveys may be ignored.

Things to Keep in Mind

Although a research assignment can be daunting, there are things which can make the process less stressful, more manageable, and yield a better result.  And they are generally applicable across all types and levels of research.

1.  Be aware of the parameters of the assignment: topic selection options, due date, length requirement, source requirements.  These form the box into which you must fit your work.  

2. Treat the assignment as a series of components or stages rather than one undivided whole.

• devise a schedule for each task in the process: topic selection and refinement (background/overview information), source material from books (JaxCat), source material from journals (databases/Discovery), other sources (internet, interviews, non-print materials); the note-taking, drafting, and editing processes.
• stick to your timetable.  Time can be on your side as a researcher, but only if you keep to your schedule and do not delay or put everything off until just before the assignment deadline. 

3.  Leave enough time between your final draft and the submission date of your work that you can do one final proofread after the paper is no longer "fresh" to you.  You may find passages that need additional work because you see that what is on the page and what you meant to write are quite different.  Even better, have a friend or classmate read your final draft before you submit it.  A fresh pair of eyes sometimes has clearer vision. 

4.  If at any point in the process you encounter difficulties, consult a librarian.  Hunters use guides; fishermen use guides.  Explorers use guides.  When you are doing research, you are an explorer in the realm of ideas; your librarian is your guide. 

A Note on Sources

Research requires engagement with various types of sources.

• Primary sources: the thing itself, such as letters, diaries, documents, a painting, a sculpture; in lower-division literary research, usually a play, poem, or short story.
• Secondary sources: information about the primary source, such as books, essays, journal articles, although images and other media also might be included.  Companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias are secondary sources.
• Tertiary sources: things such as bibliographies, indexes, or electronic databases (minus the full text) which serve as guides to point researchers toward secondary sources.  A full text database would be a combination of a secondary and tertiary source; some books have a bibliography of additional sources in the back.

Accessing sources requires going through various "information portals," each designed to principally support a certain type of content.  Houston Cole Library provides four principal information portals:

• JaxCat online catalog: books, although other items such as journals, newspapers, DVDs, and musical scores also may be searched for.
• Electronic databases: journal articles, newspaper stories, interviews, reviews (and a few books; JaxCat still should be the "go-to" portal for books).  JaxCat indexes records for the complete item: the book, journal, newspaper, CD but has no records for parts of the complete item: the article in the journal, the editorial in the newspaper, the song off the CD.  Databases contain records for these things.
• Discovery Search: mostly journal articles, but also (some) books and (some) random internet pages.  Discovery combines elements of the other three information portals and is especially useful for searches where one is researching a new or obscure topic about which little is likely to be written, or does not know where the desired information may be concentrated.  Discovery is the only portal which permits simul-searching across databases provided by multiple vendors.
• Internet (Bing, Dogpile, DuckDuckGo, Google, etc.): primarily webpages, especially for businesses (.com), government divisions at all levels (.gov), or organizations (.org). as well as pages for primary source-type documents such as lesson plans and public-domain books.  While book content (Google Books) and journal articles (Google Scholar) are accessible, these are not the strengths of the internet and more successful searches for this type of content can be performed through JaxCat and the databases.  

NOTE: There is no predetermined hierarchy among these information portals as regards which one should be used most or gone to first.  These considerations depend on the task at hand and will vary from assignment o assignment.

The link below provides further information on the different source types.

• Research Methods From Truckee Meadows Community College: a guide to basic research. The tab "What Type of Source?" presents an overview of the various types of information sources, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each.
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Poetry as Literature Review

• September 2017
• In book: Doing Poetic Inquiry (pp.75-84)

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The Uses of Poetry

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2016.1230300
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Poetry matters because it is a central example of the use human beings make of words to explore and understand. Like other forms of writing we value, it lends shape and meaning to our experiences and helps us to move confidently in the world we know and then to step beyond it. (From Teaching Poetry in the Secondary School: An HMI View , Department for Education and Science, 1987, quoted in Ofsted Citation 2007 , 6)

Poetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world – not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives. (Alexander Citation 2013)

Part of the problem is that arguments relating to the importance of teaching poetry are often drawn together with arguments that relate to the importance of teaching literature more generally, without making the case for what is distinctive about poetry. Footnote 1 Take, for instance, Fecho, Amatucci, and Skinner, who argue that the central aim of teaching poetry is to expand understanding of self and society: ‘teachers in English classrooms [should] situate the reading and creation of texts as ways of making meaning, as processes through which we develop existential sense of ourselves as actors in larger social worlds’ (Fecho, Amatucci, and Skinner Citation 2007 , 34). Although they highlight something of immense value in the study of poetry, they use this as the basis for a generalisation about the value of literature without articulating what it is about poetry in particular that can serve such function in learning and development.

Failing to make the case for poetry in the curriculum as a distinct artform risks a reduction in the degree and range of poetry students encounter through education. It is widely reported that a large number of primary and secondary teachers are not comfortable teaching poetry and prefer to teach other forms of literature (see Benton Citation 1999 ; Cremin et al. Citation 2008 ); without a clear argument for the inclusion of poetry, there is a real concern that poetry could lose its place in the study of literature in schools (Dymoke Citation 2001 , Citation 2012 , Citation 2015 ; Xerri Citation 2014 ). This point is suggested by one of the key findings of the 2007 Ofsted report, Poetry in Schools : ‘Many teachers, especially in the primary schools visited, did not know enough about poetry and this was reflected in the limited range of poems studied’ (Ofsted Citation 2007 , 4).

Poetry gives teachers an authentic text in which to work on phonics, phonemic awareness, and language development skills such as rhyme, word families, and alliteration … Poems provide a simpler context for students to practice these skills, using text that is at their interest and academic levels. (Stickling, Prasun, and Olsen Citation 2011 , 32; see also Benton Citation 1999 , 527) Footnote 2

[it] elicited some really quite moving talk about ‘prison time’ and using its space to think. One reader talked about a bunch of flowers and how she looked at them with a focus and concentration here that she had never done outside prison. Another reminisced about the ‘time to stop and stare’ her father had had, and sounded a note of regret that she has not always done this. She also looked forward to an imagined future where she could take more time. (Billington and Robinson Citation 2013 , 20)

One of the main aims of this special issue is to bring together hitherto unconnected approaches to the study of poetry’s role in different stages of lifelong learning by those working in different disciplines in order to provide clearer evidence about poetry’s educational value, and its roles at different stages of personal development. This special issue, therefore, presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on poetry and its uses by experts in education, literary studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and actor training in an attempt to start to weave together the potential benefits of engaging with poetry identified by these different disciplines to inform approaches to teaching poetry.

The original research presented in this special issue collectively argues that poetry has a distinctive value compared with other cultural objects and experiences, not least because of its ability to connect people’s cognitive and affective responses, mind and body, experiences and memories. Importantly, we demonstrate that the value of people’s encounters with poetry can be enhanced by modes of delivery that encourage multiple modes of engagement: through the written word, the heard voice and bodily movement.

The core of this collection of essays arises out of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Uses of Poetry’ (2013–14), led by Kate Rumbold, Footnote 3 that brought together evidence and expertise from a team of eminent and emerging scholars on the uses and values of poetry at different stages of life in order to develop new, interdisciplinary ways of understanding, articulating and quantifying the values of poetry. This special issue also draws together some important related projects from the UK, such as the University of Cambridge ‘Poetry and Memory’ project led by David Whitley and Debbie Pullinger, and Philip Davis and Josie Billington’s work at the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), University of Liverpool, in conjunction with the Liverpool-based charity The Reader.

Dominant themes that emerge from bringing these articles together include the way in which a focus on memorisation of poetry can reveal insight into the nature of memory, the contribution poetry can make to our well-being, as well as the importance of focusing on both the affective and cognitive dimensions of our engagement with poetry to enhance both appreciation of the work and personal development, all of which have great implications for approaches to teaching poetry in order to cultivate such value.

The issue opens with Debbie Pullinger and David Whitley’s ‘Beyond Measure: The Value of the Memorised Poem’. The article presents the results of a recent survey conducted as part of their Poetry and Memory Project, which sought to investigate the role memorisation of poetry can play in internalising poetry and helping individuals to connect with poems on a personal level. In their thought-provoking article, Pullinger and Whitley seek to understand the relationship between memorisation and literary analysis, arguing that the memorised poem can be a source of meaning for the individual to accompany them at different stages in life.

Looking more directly at the role of poetry in education, Jacquelyn Bessell and Patricia Riddell focus on the memorisation process itself. In their article, ‘Embodiment and Performance’, they present a small-scale study, which investigated the role of bodily movement in the memorisation of poetry; whether performing physical actions in learning the lines of a poem aids recall of those lines. They discuss the results of this study in relation to embodied cognition, which suggests that an embodied approach to engaging with poetry can heighten the internalising of the poem, and thus the ability to recite the work accurately.

Following on from this and taking up the issue of the importance of personal and emotional responses to poetry, Kate Rumbold and Karen Simecek argue in ‘Affective and Cognitive Responses to Poetry in the University Classroom’, that there is a need to cultivate greater affective response in teaching poetry in the classroom. They introduce recent work in psychology to make the case that affective engagement can lead to cognitive rewards that could not be achieved by taking a purely analytic approach to the poem, and therefore there is a need to rebalance cognitive and affective engagement with poetry in the classroom. They also discuss some of the barriers to taking such affective-orientated approaches to teaching poetry in which they draw on observations from a recent small-scale study.

In their ‘Actual Texts, Possible Meanings: The Uses of Poetry and the Subjunctification of Experience’, Andrew Green, Viv Ellis and Karen Simecek discuss how they recreated Jerome Bruner’s classic experiment exploring the differences in experience of hearing different forms of text read aloud. In the original experiment, Bruner compared a transactional text with a literary text, noting that hearers were more likely to use complex, ‘subjunctifying’ language in reporting what they heard after listening to the literary text read aloud. In their version of the experiment, Green, Ellis and Simecek add in a further layer by considering difference in experience of kinds of literary text, comparing the language used in reporting on hearing a news article, literary prose and a poem. Their findings suggest a heightened use of subjunctifying language in the case of hearing poetry, demonstrating that poetry holds an important place in our exploration of language and meaning.

Reflecting on recent work in neuroscience and research in philosophy on the nature of metaphor, Patricia Riddell explores the human need for creative use of language in her ‘Metaphor, Simile, Analogy and the Brain’ and the differences served by metaphor, simile and analogy. This article outlines the complex brain processes involved in processing figurative language, including the difference in how the brain processes metaphor and simile. Through her discussion, she argues for the evolutionary significance of these important aspects of language use and the educative value of repeated engagement with such complex forms of language in aiding ‘conceptual expansion’.

With the final three articles, we turn to a more practical focus on the uses of poetry. In ‘Becoming Poetry Teachers: Studying Poems Through Choral Reading’, Gabrielle Cliff Hodges discusses challenges for the student-teacher in preparing to teach poetry. She argues that student-teachers are often least confident in teaching poetry and are uncertain of how best to engage their students with this particular literary form. Critical of the recent focus on recitation of poetry, which she argues promotes a solitary engagement with poetry, Cliff Hodges argues for the need for a more collaborative approach to engaging with poetry, through activities such as ‘choral reading’. Reflecting on her own teaching practice, she argues that the most effective way of engaging student-teachers with poetry is through reading and exploring together.

Nicholas Bayley offers a practitioner’s perspective of poetry, drawing on his own personal experiences of the value of learning poetry by heart and how this has had unexpected positive results in his psychoanalytic practice. He puts forward an insightful argument for recognising the imagistic power of poetry and how this connects with our individual perceptions of the world in which we live.

Finally, Philip Davis and Josie Billington provide a further exploration of how poetry works for us – the mechanisms at work, again offering a vision of the therapeutic benefits of reading poetry, in particular poetry as ‘offering a place for thinking about [life] without ceasing to be in it’. They suggest the importance of focusing on the experience and value of reading prior to the kind of experience of poetry we have once we have learnt about the poetic structure more formally. By considering this in the context of education, there might be an important role for teachers to play in offering students the space to encounter and value poetry in this pre-theoretical way. There is an immensely powerful experience on offer from a first encounter, further supporting the call to take more care in attending to the rich affective dimensions of our experience of poetry for its cognitive, emotional and social benefits.

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L006324/1].

1. There are some notable exceptions to this, see, for instance, Dymoke, Lambirth and Wilson ( Citation 2015 ), Pullinger ( Citation 2012 ) and Simecek and Ellis ( Citation forthcoming ).

2. For a good discussion of two historic models of using poetry to enhance literacy skills, Geisel’s The Cat in the Hat series and Kenneth Koch’s Teaching Children to Write Poetry , see Bramberger ( Citation 2015 ); see also Rasinski ( Citation 2014 ).

3. Other project members included Viv Ellis (Education, King’s College London), Patricia Riddell (Psychology, University of Reading), Karen Simecek (Philosophy, University of Warwick), Abigail Williams (English Literature, University of Oxford), Clare Rathbone (Psychology, Oxford Brookes University) and Emma Howells (poet and creative writing teacher). The full report from the project is available at https://usesofpoetry.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/ahrc_cultural_value_rda-uses-of-poetry-rumbold.pdf .

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