Monday, October 11, 2010

Hart Crane Paragraphs

You'll remember our exercise last week: groups of four students composed paragraphs to reveal the "environmental" message or content within the section "The Tunnel" from Hart Crane's poem The Bridge. I have compiled these paragraphs into a PDF, available here , and I hope you will read them all and then choose one upon which to comment here in the comments section. Choose a paragraph that you think is most effective on a rhetorical level and that is also interesting in terms of its "reading" of the poem. Why is the paragraph effective in your opinion? Give specific reasons and please comment explicitly on the authors' "craft" in writing their paragraph in the way that they did. What is worth emulating? Be sure to give the number of the paragraph upon which you are commenting.

12 comments:

  1. In reading paragraph 004.5, I found it to be a strong point that the writers focus on how Crane thinks technology and urbanization gets in the way of people connecting with each other. Not only does Crane make a statement about industrialization's affect on the environment, but he is also speaking of how it affects the people who live there. If technology did not separate them from each other, they would be more at one with nature and with each other. The writers of this paragraph clearly illustrate their point by stating it and supporting it with the quote.

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  2. Paragraph 4.7 strikes me as an especially effective and incisive paragraph. Its effectiveness comes from tight and succinct structure of the paragraph. Quotations from the original work are also implemented sparingly, but effectively. The quotations are used to tie together ideas, rather than to serve only as examples. Given the tight form of the paragraph, too many quotes of great length would have taken taken away from its impact.
    The "reading" of the poem is especially incisive because it maintains that there is still a relationship between people and nature, even though the individual elements of that relationship have been replaced by human contrivances. An excellent example of this is how it is pointed out that the "The subway carries the people from place to place like “the River that is East”".

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  3. Paragaph 4.6 makes an interesting connection in Crane's style as he communicates the destruction of nature at the hands of the city. They examine that because Crane ignores the state of nature amongst the filthy city, he is in fact highlighting that observation. By chosing a quote that reflects the dirtiness of cities, this paragraph explains to the reader that though Crane does not directly recognize the lack of presence of nature in the city, he is specifically refering to the city's ability to exile nature from its realm.

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  4. Paragraph 004.2 does not point out any sort of unique view point. In fact it seems to hold the exact same opinion as many of the other paragraphs. The interesting part of paragraph 004.2 then is not the stance it took, nor the ideas at its center, but the way in which it took its stance. Paragraph 004.2 uses the same overly dramatic tones and ghastly images as found in Crane's rather prosaic poem. The authors decided to emulate the forceful language Crane used to describe the city and suck readers into his ideas. For this reason, paragraph 004.2 stood out above the rest.

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  5. paragraph 005.1 points out something that I had not seen before; people not noticing how the subway environment is detrimental. This is interesting due to the statement that humanity will later "kiss" nature goodbye, this being ironic because humanity is only awaiting its doom. I had not seen the poem from that standpoint prior to reading paragraph 5.1, and it does a good job in explaining the monotonous environment that is presented by hart crane.

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  6. I feel that paragraph 004.3 did the best at summarizing the part of Crane's poem "The Bridge" titled "The Tunnel". When the authors talked about how Crane seemed to emphasis the evils of technology, I think that they hit the arguement on the head with that statement. To wrap up this comment, I think that paragraph 004.3 did a a very good job at summarizing the poem by Hart Crane and even introduced some points about it that I had not thought of before.

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  7. Paragraph 4.2 stood out to me above all of the other paragraphs. Its message is delivered well because a number of appropriate quotes from the poem are included that make the paragraph's given interpretation of the poem seem like the right interpretation. The paragraph also stands out because of its syntax. The appropriate usage of words like "antithesis" just make it appear like the authors knew what they were talking about. The whole structure of the paragraph is worth emulating; it clearly presents its topic, provides support for its points, and has strong diction.

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  8. I like 004.7 the most and agree with it in the sense that I covered a similar interpretation of "The Tunnel" in more detail in my response paper. The construction of this paragraph is also decent in that it incorporates direct quotes from the poem excerpt to provide reinforcement into their claims.

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  9. I especially like paragraph 004.2. It is a very accurate description of the poem itself and it gives insight to what Crane was possibly trying to get at. The paragraph mentions an emotional and mental "suffocation" of the city dweller. Crane does compare the subway and the smog of the city to hell and demons. Overall, the authors of the paragraph did give some insight into the mind of Crane and interpreted the poem well. The paragraph utilized good phrases from the poem and used them effectively to back up examples of imagery from the poem.

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  10. Paragraph 004.2 stands out in my mind because it captures ideas/feelings that Crane could only show with a poetic piece. Describing the evils of Crane's city pails in comparison with the telling by Crane. Paragraph 004.2 examines his city by puling from the poem and shows how far Cranes use of words (as opposed to what the words actually say) speak to the reader.

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  11. I liked paragraph 5.4. It gave specific examples from the text to really support its claim. This paragraph also brought up new ideas from the poem that I had no recognized before, by calling it a "call to arms." I had never thought of the poem that way. I just read it as a poem cursing the man-made world. Instead Crane was calling attention to the dire state of the man-made world and hoping people would start to change. His call to arms is to save the environment before it gets too late and the world falls apart.

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  12. I agree with Megatron. I thought that paragraph 5.4 gave very vivid examples and imagery to support the claim of the paragraph. Using specific phrases, the poem allowed me to see it in a different light than that of which I had seen before, fighting for the environment, hoping for immediate response rather than a slow, steady pace with a slow incline of environmental awareness.

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