20th-c. American writing assignment

I'd chosen the quote collage option but I think I'm going to switch to the short paper option. The current idea is to write on my poets vis-à-vis Sontag's insistence on form and possibly (I need to read it first!) also Cleanth Brooks's idea of "the heresy of paraphrase." What I've read so far: I liked Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, loved Frost's New Hampshire and Bishop's Questions of Travel, and disliked Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. What I plan to read going forward: Wallace Stevens's The Palm at the End of the Mind, the rest of Frost, the rest of Bishop, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets. I expect to like Stevens and I know I'll like Millay ("Thou art not lovelier than lilacs" is a dear favorite <3 and how could I not like "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare"), and one way to structure the short paper would be to talk about poise (Brooks, Frost, Bishop, presumably Stevens) vs. passion (Millay, who uses the tight structure of a sonnet to contain her emotion; Ginsberg, who...doesn't), about irony (very much present in Frost and Bishop, I don't know about the others - and a question is whether you can be ironic when you are, as Ginsberg is, wracked by pain])...

List of posts: 20th-c. American literature

Fiction

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
  
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)
  
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) [notes]

Nonfiction

• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) [notes]

Poetry

• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
  
• Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923)
  
• Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) [notes]
  
• Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965)

Criticism

• T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)
  
• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964)
  
• Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (1964)