"The title of a poem almost always offers the audience something signi cant to their reading and understanding. In the work of at least two poets you have studied, show how titles have affected your interpretations of the poems"

The key to answering this question is dissecting what it is asking - essentially how the titles of two poems relate to the content of the poems. For example, if the title had melancholic connotations and the poem was concerning loss, it would relate and thus emphasise certain aspects of the language. Crucial in tackling this poem is to find two pieces with similar themes, in order to be able to discuss and write about them simultaneously in the essay, ensuring its fluency and fluidity. Discussing two different kinds of poem separately is usually ineffective. The two poems I would choose for this question would be Ted Hughes's Lovesong and Sylvia Plath's Daddy, which both deal with the intertwining of love and hatred, and generally extreme emotion. The student must pick out three themes that the poems have in common in order to use these themes as the base for their body paragraphs. Abstract themes are acceptable, I would choose obsession, contradiction and irreconcilability. Once these are chosen, the student simply needs to find quotes in each poem that relate to the theme, and discuss how the feeling eminated by the chosen quote is either changed or intensified by the title. For example, in Daddy, there is a line 'every woman loves a fascist'. This clearly displays contradiction in her confused emotional state, yet this charged political statement is intensified by the childlike innocence of the title, iterating how Plath is conscious of her father's bad qualities, yet still thinks of him as if she were young and happy. Three paragraphs analysing the different connections between title and theme should make up the essay, followed by an almost evaluative conclusion as to the effects of the titles.