In this formal analytical essay, you will use a New Critical lens to analyze one of the poems listed below. Your goal is to help your reader understand the poem more fully by offering insights into how the text works on its own or how the text can be understood within the context of the author’s life or times.

In a well-developed essay of approximately 1000 words, analyze one of the assigned texts using one of the two critical lenses named above.

• Your Introduction should include a brief summary of the text that names the title, author, and provides a brief summary of the action of the poem. You may find it useful to summarize another writer's interpretation (as long as it is different from your own).
• Your thesis statement (which appears at the end of your Intro) should make an interpretive claim about the poem.
• The body of your essay should be driven by topic-sentence claims that are supported by textual evidence and your analysis of the evidence. When providing evidence, it's important that you integrate quoted material into your own sentences. For this essay, do not quote more than a phrase of the text at a time.
• If you choose a New Critical lens, you will probably want to identify specific ironies or tensions in the poem and show how they work to create a unified theme. You may also choose to discuss how specific literary techniques contribute to the poem’s unity.
• Remember to provide context for quoted text. In general, please embed quotes for clarity.
• Provide a Work(s) Cited page in MLA format.

POEM IS ATTACHED.

A Kiss by David Thomas Martinez