In Memorial, Alice Oswalds chief aim is to create a war memorial for the dead soldiers in the Iliad. How is she accomplishing this with form? What methods does she employ to communicate the poem’s central message, purpose, and meaning?

In Memorial, Alice Oswalds chief aim is to create a war memorial for the dead soldiers in the Iliad. How is she accomplishing this with form? What methods does she employ to communicate the poem’s central message, purpose, and meaning?

We have discussed at length all of the many ways Alice Oswald is employing form in Memorial in order to amplify the poem’s central meaning, from the way the poem appears on the page to how she is wielding her content. Through her use of various forms, Oswald is essentially reproducing the act of visiting and walking through an actual physical war memorial. Sometimes she formats the poem to look like a wall of names. Similes(pastoral lyrics) almost always appear after soldiers’ biographies (laments/funeral songs), akin to walking from grave to grave. Similes are repeated for special emphasis (providing the reader a extra moment of contemplation) as well as to invoke the original poem’s oral qualities (reflecting how ancient Greeks would have almost certainly listened to the Iliad, not read it). Most importantly, Oswald recreates the enargeia of the original poem through the use of similes and other metaphoric language, or how the action of the similes reveals or recreates the “overwhelming reality” of the topics and concepts that are otherwise extremely difficult to truly describe or communicate (such as the adrenalin or bloodlust of war, the terror from receiving a mortal wound, or paralyzing grief).

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Essay Prompt: In Memorial, Alice Oswalds chief aim is to create a war memorial for the dead soldiers in the Iliad. How is she accomplishing this with form? What methods does she employ to communicate the poem’s central message, purpose, and meaning?

Requirements:

• Your piece should have an introduction that presents your argument (thesis) and provides context for your discussion of the essay topic. Your thesis should directly state what is the poem’s central message or purpose (which has to do with what all war memorials are accomplishing).
• Your piece should have an argumentative thesis that answers the promptand can be further developed with individual points. Your thesis should be one central opinion, not a list of multiple arguments.
• Your body paragraphs should have the following:

• topic sentences that state specific ideas/opinions to prove and develop your thesis
• multiple, specific examples to support those opinions
• thorough explanation of how each example supports the point of the paragraph and the overall thesis

• Your piece should have a conclusion that clarifies and discusses the significance of your overall argument and does not simply restate or summarize what you have previous written
• Your essay should correctly quote and explain multiple specific similes from Memorial
• Your essay should utilize a range of sentence combining strategies, including the use of coordinators, subordinators, noun-phrase appositives, and relative clauses
• Your piece should be 4-5 pages long, carefully proofread, and formatted in MLA style