American Literature / Unit 1 AML 0037 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
What the Speaker's Response Question Rewards
The idea
A recurring question asks how the speaker's apparent response to the poem's events can best be characterized, and the answer is almost never the strongest feeling on the list. The method has three steps. Step one: separate what the speaker reports from what the speaker judges, because a poem may narrate a catastrophe and pass no verdict on it. Step two: check whether the poem supplies any word of evaluation at all; if none appears, feelings like anger, malice and remorse are unsupported, however natural they seem. Step three: choose the option that matches the poem's silence. A speaker who reports an event without explaining it, and whose telling stops where the event does, is registering the fact and not accounting for it, and the word for that is bewilderment.
In practice
What is reported, what is judged, what is left unsaid.
Where people slip
The strong emotions on the list are distractors placed for readers answering from their own reaction. The question asks about the speaker, and the evidence is the vocabulary the speaker uses, not the shock the reader feels.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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