The poetry professor confides in me while we're walking to his office from the classroom that most students don't care about learning to write well or better than they do, and therefore don't ask for immediate feedback.
I had previously over the weekend sent him a draft of my paper on "The Waste Land" and "The Second Coming," and we've been haggling over it ever since. The poetry professor provides intense and extensive comments, all of which I took into consideration, and most of the changes he recommended, I made. He caught passive language, he improved my selection of verbs, and also told me that my essay was "too abstact," which I took as a big compliment. In poetry analysis, you want to be abstract.
This paper brought me much misery over the weekend. I literally spent six hours or more sitting in front of the computer while relaxing in my bed, and staring at a blank screen. Occasionally, I would switch to reading, and then I'd come back to the white, empty Word doc. It was extremely annoying because I knew I couldn't produce the level of interpretation that I had read from books in the library on "The Waste Land," I simply did not have the education behind me nor the experience of dissecting works. But, finally, after the muscle relaxer had partially worn off, I was able to concentrate and produce a few pages.
"That's a great line," the poetry professor says as he's leaning over my essay while sitting in his office's chair. He's referring to "...'The Waste Land' describes the loss of religious faith through the image of 'after the agony in stony places,' as if there is no soft, maternalistic comfort in landing when one free falls from grace."
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