Drama and further texts: AQA English Literature B Poetry anthology…

The idea

This anthology cluster explores tragedy across centuries and forms. Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale and its Prologue frame tragedy as a series of falls from prosperity, raising questions about fortune, providence and narrative authority. The extract from Paradise Lost presents Satan’s tragic grandeur and the consequences of ambition. ‘Tithonus’ dramatises immortal longing and decay, while ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ reads the Titanic’s sinking as an ironic, almost cosmic tragedy. ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Out, out…’ examine heroic and ordinary death, and ‘Jessie Cameron’, ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘Miss Gee’ show tragedy in social, domestic and ironic modes. You should compare how poets use voice, form, imagery and structure to create tragic effects, and how context shapes what counts as tragic.

What earns the marks

• Compare how different poets present the tragic fall or reversal, from Chaucer’s de casibus pattern to Hardy’s ironic collision of human vanity and natural forces.
• Discuss how context informs tragic reading: medieval fortune and providence, Milton’s theological epic, Victorian doubt and empire, Irish myth and nationalism, modern warfare and domestic ordinariness.
• Explore the anthology’s range of tragic endings — death, deposition, decay, accident, social ruin — and evaluate how far each text invites pity, fear, irony or protest.
• Use connections and contrasts between poems to build an argument about what tragedy means across the collection, rather than treating each poem in isolation.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Treating each poem as a separate case study without making comparative connections.

  Put it right by grouping texts by theme, form or tragic mode and using cross-references.

• Assuming all anthology poems share one definition of tragedy.

  Put it right by distinguishing classical, medieval, Shakespearean, modern and ironic tragic modes.

• Ignoring the extract from Paradise Lost as part of a longer epic.

  Put it right by analysing how the extract’s placement and epic conventions shape its tragic effect.

• Reducing context to biographical facts.

  Put it right by linking historical, theological and literary contexts to the poems’ language and structure.

Exam tips

• Anchor each comparative point in close analysis of a specific quotation, image or formal feature before moving to the next poem.
• Use the anthology’s chronological and generic range to show how tragedy evolves, but avoid a simple survey — make evaluative judgements about continuity and change.
• Prepare flexible groupings (e.g. heroic falls, domestic tragedies, ironic tragedies) so you can adapt to different questions.
• Keep terminology precise: dramatic monologue, blank verse, ballad, de casibus, apostrophe, caesura, enjambment, volta, refrain.