7.A Claim and Evidence About a Poem (LAN-1.B)

Say a poem is about death and you have said almost nothing. Nobody can argue with it, nobody can test it against the lines, and it would fit a thousand other poems just as well. A claim has to be specific enough to be wrong. It names what the poem is doing with its subject, not just what the subject is, so there is something at stake for a reader to check against the actual words on the page.

That checking is what makes a claim defensible. Evidence is not decoration you add after you have decided what you think. It is the thing the claim has to survive contact with. If you claim a couplet turns waste into protest, you point to the exact phrase doing that work, not for the light, but so the house would cost, and you show how those words carry the argument. If the lines will not support the claim, the claim was never defensible, it was just asserted.

This is also why summary fails as claim, even accurate summary. Saying a family drove to the coast every summer and then stopped restates events in order. There is nothing in that sentence for evidence to hold up, because it already is the evidence, flattened into plot. A real claim asks what that stopping means, what the long road or the empty last summer does to the poem's feeling about home. Build that claim about one stanza or couplet first. A reading of the whole poem is just several such claims, each tested against its own lines, joined into one argument about how the poem works.