Question

Respond to one of the following essay prompts:

A. Poe believed that good short stories require a single, unifying effect. Evaluate one of the stories in the American Romanticism unit using Poe’s standard of unity. Do the descriptions, incidents, and images all contribute to the single effect of the story? Is there a single effect? Feel free to evaluate Poe’s own story.

B. Consider what you have learned about American history during the period of 1820 to 1864. How do the stories in the American Romanticism reflect what was going on in the country then?

C. Read and analyze "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman. What Romantic ideas does it express, and how does the structure of the poem reinforce the meaning?

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.


Select the link to access the English Essay Rubric.