This checklist is not a set of rules. Every student brings a different reading to Eliot, and many of those readings are valid and interesting. What follows is simply a collection of questions worth sitting with as you draft and revise your essay — prompts to help you identify where your argument is working and where it might benefit from a little more thought. Take what is useful, adapt what is not, and feel free to push back on any of it.
Thesis
Your thesis is the idea that holds everything else together. It does not have to be the most complicated idea you have ever had — it just has to be yours, and it has to be sustained.
- Do you have a clear, considered thesis that is directly connected to the question and links both poems in a meaningful way?
- One possible direction: the flaneur’s psyche is divided between an authentic self and a public alter-ego in Prufrock, and these two identities continue to drift through the streets of Rhapsody on a Windy Night. This is just one interpretation among many — there is no obligation to use it.
- Is your thesis something you can return to and develop across both body paragraphs, rather than a strong opening statement that quietly disappears?
Context
Context works best when it feels like a natural part of your thinking rather than something you have remembered to include. The goal is not to list historical facts but to show how the world Eliot inhabited shapes the ideas in his poetry.
- Have you introduced a sense of Eliot’s context somewhere in your opening paragraph?
- Have you included roughly two contextual references in each body paragraph, woven into your analysis rather than tagged on at the end?
- Is your context doing real work in the essay? For example: the iambic pentameter in Prufrock’s confession that “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me” is humdrum and repetitious, creating an ennuied rhythm that reflects the doldrum of 20th-century urban employment. The context here is not a separate point — it deepens the explanation of what the technique achieves.
- Have you considered drawing on more than one dimension of Eliot’s life and times?
- Historical: the Technological Revolution, the 2nd Industrial Revolution, the Great War (WW1), fin de siècle European decay, industrialisation and urbanisation, individualism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, the Great Depression.
- Personal: Eliot’s philosophical studies, his Boston upbringing, his English heritage.
- Religious: Secularism, Anglo-Catholicism, Unitarianism, eschatology, anagogy.
- Literary: Romanticism, Dantean references, the French Symbolists, the Imagists, the Metaphysical Poets, Henri Bergson and Bergsonian Theory, literary modernism.
Not every essay needs to cover all of these. But if your contextual references are always coming from the same source, it may be worth considering whether another angle could enrich your argument.
Analysis
This is where most essays find their ceiling — not because of missing knowledge, but because the analysis moves sideways rather than forward.
- Is your analysis building across each paragraph? Each piece of evidence ideally relates to the central idea of the paragraph, adds something the previous piece did not, and connects back to your thesis in some way.
- Is every piece of analysis tied to the question in some way? It is easy to write interesting things about Eliot that are technically correct but not quite responsive to what is being asked.
- Have you moved beyond the literal meaning of the text toward its figurative implications? For example, the image of a patient etherised upon a table is visually striking, but what it suggests about the paralysis of the modern subject is where the real analysis lives.
- Have you considered connecting your reading of Eliot to broader ideas about human experience, beyond his individual biography? This is what gives an essay its sense of universality and timelessness.
- Do your connectives help the reader follow the movement of your argument? Phrases like this is compounded by, by contrast, and what this ultimately suggests signal that your thinking is progressing rather than accumulating.
- Have you reflected at any point on what Eliot seems to have been trying to achieve, and how specific techniques serve that purpose?
Techniques and Evidence
A strong essay does not merely identify techniques — it shows why those particular techniques matter, and what they reveal about the poem’s concerns.
- Have you drawn on a range of technique types across each paragraph? Language (including imagery), structure, movement, and sound each offer different kinds of insight, and varying between them tends to produce richer analysis.
- Have you connected micro techniques (word choice, punctuation, assonance) to macro techniques (dramatic monologue, free verse, fragmentation) within the same piece of analysis? Moving between scales of observation is one of the markers of a sophisticated response.
- Have you considered the structural qualities of Eliot’s poetry in each paragraph — free verse, dramatic monologue, stream of consciousness — and thought about how these structures operate across both poems?
- Have you engaged with some of the techniques and literary qualities Eliot is particularly known for? The objective correlative, the flaneur persona, accrued images of decay, musical connotations, prosopopoeia, fragmentation, and the use of epigraphs are all worth considering.
- Are your quotations as short as they need to be? A concise, well-chosen quotation that is closely analysed will almost always outperform a longer quotation with more general commentary.
- Have you thought about the poems’ titles and what they might contribute to your reading? The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night each carry layers of irony and meaning that reward attention.
- Do your quotations sit naturally within your own sentences? If the phrase this is seen in the quote appears in your draft, it is usually a sign that the quotation can be integrated more smoothly.
- Have you paid attention to tone, mood, rhythm, and pace? These are not background features — they are techniques in their own right and can form the basis of genuinely interesting analysis.
Critical Perspectives
Critical perspectives are a requirement of the module, but they are most valuable when they feel like a genuine contribution to your argument rather than a citation for its own sake.
- Do you have two critical perspectives across your essay, with one appearing in each body paragraph?
- Are your critical perspectives accurately quoted, correctly attributed, and noted in your essay’s referencing?
- Does each critical perspective connect meaningfully to the analysis around it? The best critical perspectives do not interrupt the argument — they extend it.
- For example: critic F. Locke suggests that the second person accusative “you” in the verse refers to the alter ego of the flaneur, thereby establishing his two, distinct personalities: his public pretense and his internal quiddity. A perspective like this earns its place because it directly supports the surrounding analysis.
Structure
A well-structured essay does not just present ideas — it guides the reader through them.
- Does your introduction do more than introduce a topic? It should establish an argument and give the reader a sense of where the essay is headed.
- Do your two body paragraphs connect to each other, both conceptually and through the language of your topic and concluding sentences? The transition between paragraphs matters.
- Does your conclusion arrive with a sense of finality rather than simply restating what has come before? The final sentence carries more weight than students often give it credit for.
Rubric and Module
Everything in the essay ultimately needs to align with the requirements of Critical Study of Literature.
- Does your essay engage with both components of textual integrity: organic unity and enduring relevance? These are central to the module and worth returning to explicitly, not just in passing.
- Have you engaged with a range of the distinctive qualities that characterise Eliot’s work? These might include nihilism, fatalism, the influence of the French Symbolists (Jules Laforgue in particular), the Imagists, Metaphysical Poetry, the objective correlative, the dissociation and unification of sensibilities, fragmentation, flaneur personae, musical connotations, prosopopoeia, ennui, accrued images of decay, rationalism, existentialism, eschatology, anagogy, and the use of epigraphs.
- Are these distinctive qualities connected to the specific techniques, evidence, and argument in your essay, or are they mentioned in passing without being developed?
- Have you reflected somewhere on why these poems continue to matter — what they reveal about human experience that remains meaningful long after Eliot’s own time?
A Final Note
No checklist can tell you what to think about Eliot, and this one is not trying to. The questions here are offered in the spirit of revision — they are the kinds of things worth asking yourself before you submit a final draft. Your own interpretation of the poems is valuable, and the most interesting essays tend to be the ones where a student has genuinely engaged with the text rather than worked from a template.
If something here does not apply to your argument, that is fine. If something prompts you to rethink a paragraph, even better.