Poetry: Lesson Plans

Emily Dickinson's poetry often reveals a child-like fascination with the natural world. She writes perceptively of butterflies, birds, and bats and uses lucid metaphors to describe the sky and the sea.

Students explore the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell's use of tone, imagery, and poetic form as he attempts to seduce his “Coy Mistress.”

Some of the most well known, and most important, works of literature in the world are examples of epic poetry. This lesson will introduce students to the epic poem form and to its roots in oral tradition.

Journey through the Inferno to learn how allegory, allusion, and drama combine in Dante’s poetic art.

This unit explores elements of wonder, distortion, fantasy, and whimsy in Lewis Carroll's adaptation for younger readers of his beloved classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

When children hear, write and recite poetry, they understand more deeply the qualities of verse — the importance of sound, compactness, internal integrity, imagination, and line. Working collaboratively on poetry provides a safe structure for student creativity.

Students examine the relationship of poetic form and content, shaped by alliteration, consonance, repetition, and rhythm, in two poems about fatherhood: Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz."

Centered on poems about the natural world, this lesson encourages students, first, to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals.

This lesson engages students in the reading and writing of the ghazal, a public, participatory poetic form created by the ancient Bedouins of Arabia and Persia. Students examine the structure of the ghazal, which continues as a poetic form in India, Iraq, and Iran, to derive a definition of this intricate form of word-play, and collaboratively compose their own group ghazals.

Reading Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” students will explore the use of dramatic monologue as a poetic form, where the speaker often reveals far more than intended.

Students learn the rules and conventions of haiku, study examples by Japanese masters, and create haiku of their own.

In this lesson students examine primary documents including photographs, film, maps, and essays to learn about Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and make predictions about Carl Sandburg's famous poem. After examining the poem's use of personification and apostrophe, students write their own pieces about beloved places with Sandburg's poem as a model.

French Language and World Literature classes will study the works of 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire and will learn about the connections between the Romantic Movement and themes of 21st century popular culture.

Look into the sources of the Wife’s sermon on women’s rights to learn how real women lived during the Middle Ages.

In this lesson, students analyze, compare, and contrast two famous but different poems about death. Students will study poetry form (elegy and villanelle) and poetic devices such as repetition and tone.

This lesson plan explores the characteristics of the nonsense poem as developed by British poet Edward Lear and focuses on Lear’s well-known poem “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” Students learn to recognize poetic devices such as rhyme, syllabification, and meter, and figures of speech such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, and personification, by analyzing nonsense poems and writing one of their own.

This lesson plan explores the limerick form as developed by British poet Edward Lear. Students learn about the form of the limerick poem, practice finding the meter and rhyme schemes in various Lear limericks, and write their own limericks.

Trace the elements of myth and history in the world of the Round Table.
Date Revised: 06/22/06

Students learn to analyze a variety of portraits, both literary and visual.

Metaphors are used often in literature, appearing in every genre from poetry to prose and from essays to epics. This lesson introduces students to the use of metaphor through the poetry of Langston Hughes, Margaret Atwood, and others.

Curriculum Unit overview. Modernist poetry often is difficult for students to analyze and understand. A primary reason students feel a bit disoriented when reading a modernist poem is that the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings. The rise of cities; profound technological changes in transportation, architecture, and engineering; a rising population that engendered crowds and chaos in public spaces; and a growing sense of mass markets often made individuals feel less individual and more alienated, fragmented, and at a loss in their daily worlds.

Lesson 1: Understanding the Context of Modernist Poetry
Lesson 2: Thirteen Ways of Reading a Modernist Poem
Lesson 3: Navigating Modernism with J. Alfred Prufrock

This unit on the Japanese poetic form tanka encourages students to explore the structure and content of the form and to arrive at a definition of the tanka’s structure in English. Students will read and analyze the tanka form and compare it to English structures of poetry, and will finally compose their own tankas.

In this curriculum unit, students will explore how Chopin stages the possible roles for women in Edna's time and culture through the examples of other characters in the novella.

Lesson 2: Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Chopin, Realism, and Local Color in late 19th Century America
Lesson 3: Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Searching for Women & Identity in Chopin's The Awakening

The epic poem the Ramayana is thought to have been composed more than 2500 years ago, and like the Iliad and the Odyssey, was originally transmitted orally by bards. This lesson will introduce students to the Indian concept of dharma through a reading of the epic, The Ramayana.

The Ramayana (ram-EYE-ya-na) and the Mahabharata (ma-ha-BA-ra-ta), the great Indian epics, are among the most important works of literature in South Asia. Both contain important lessons on wisdom, behavior and morality, and have been used for centuries not only as entertainment, but also as a way of instructing both children and adults in the exemplary behavior toward which they are urged to strive and the immoral behavior they are urged to shun. In this lesson students will be introduced to the story of Rama and his bride, Sita.

The story of the Ramayana has been passed from generation to generation by numerous methods and media. Initially it was passed on orally as an epic poem that was sung to audiences by a bard, as it continues to be today.

Curriculum Unit overview. Long perceived as a recluse who wrote purely in isolation, Emily Dickinson in reality maintained many dynamic correspondences throughout her lifetime and specifically sought out dialogues on her poetry. These correspondences—both professional and private—reveal a poet keenly aware of the interdependent relationship between poet and reader.

Lesson 1: Letters from Emily Dickinson: In Emily Dickinson’s Own Words: Letters and Poems
Lesson 2: Letters from Emily Dickinson: Responding to Emily Dickinson: Poetic Analysis
Lesson 3: Letters from Emily Dickinson: Emulating Emily Dickinson: Poetry Writing

While teaching some of the formal terms used to describe sonnets will be one of the aims of this lesson, our starting point and central focus throughout will be learning to appreciate the sounds of poetry.

While Paul Revere's ride is the most famous event of its kind in American history, other Americans made similar rides during the Revolutionary period. After learning about some less well known but no less colorful rides that occurred in other locations, students gather evidence to support an argument about why at least one of these "other riders" does or does not deserve to be better known.

Striking examples of poetic "pictures"-not just vivid images but the entire mental picture conjured up by a poet-are to be found in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and "The Highwayman," by Alfred Noyes. As they explore the means by which Tennyson and Noyes create these compelling pictures in words, students will also learn the critical terminology to analyze and describe a variety of poetic techniques and will have an opportunity to create their own pictures in words.

Behind many of the apparently simple stories of Robert Frost's poems are unexpected questions and mysteries. In this lesson, students anaylize what speakers include or omit from their narrative accounts, make inferences about speakers' motivations, and find evidence for their inferences in the words of the poem.

The historian and literary critic Paul Fussell has noted in The Great War and Modern Memory that, "Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it." With dawn as a common symbol in poetry, it is no wonder that, like a new understanding of dawn itself, a comprehensive body of "World War I Poetry" emerged from the trenches as well.

Conduct an experiment in literary interpretation with little-known specimens of Victorian verse.

Students are often gleeful to discover that their reading homework involves only a few short poems. Yet the attentive student realizes that carefully reading a poem involves as much work as reading a short story, article, or passage from a novel. This EDSITEment lesson teaches students how to read a poem so that they are prepared, rather than simply present, for class discussion.

The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is used as a focal point for discussion of "The American Dream" as students explore how the social, educational, economical and political climate of the 1950's affected African Americans' quest for "The American Dream".

Similes are used often in literature, appearing in every genre from poetry to prose and from epics to essays. Utilized by writers to bring their literary imagery to life, similes are an important component of reading closely and appreciating literature.

Studying Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," students explore the intricate relationship between a poem's form and its content.

In a typical high school language arts or social studies curriculum, students are asked to record events of their lives along with emotional responses and reflections. In contrast, the Japanese art of haibun, developed in Japan in the late 17th century by Matsuo Munefusa (Basho), focuses on objective reporting of the everyday moment and focusing the insights of that moment into a theme developed in a concluding poem. In this lesson students will be introduced to the Japanese writing form, the haibun.

Through close study of Alfred Stieglitz’ 1907 photograph “The Steerage” and William Carlos William’s 1962 poem “Danse Russe,” students will explore how poetry can be, in Plutarch’s words, “a speaking picture,” and a painting (or in this case a photograph) can be “a silent poetry.”

Arthur, Camelot, Gawain, a challenge, a perilous journey, a beheading, an enchantment, and a shape-shifter are the ingredients of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For the modern reader, Sir Gawain's tale is riveting even without understanding its symmetry or cultural and historical context. Viewed through the lens of the medieval thinker, reading this Arthurian tale becomes a rich, multi-layered experience.

After encountering visually stunning examples of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and engaging with the literary conventions of Anglo-Saxon poetry, students will be prepared to study Beowulf. Dispelling stereotypes about the so-called “dark ages,” this lesson helps students learn about the production of early manuscripts and the conventions of Anglo-Saxon poetry, solve online riddles, and write riddles of their own.

Students will learn about the impact of enjambment in Gwendolyn Brooks' short but far-reaching poem "We Real Cool." One element of this lesson plan that is bound to draw students in is this compelling video of working-class Bostonian John Ulrich reciting the poem (scroll down that web page to and click on the John Ulrich thumbnail).

This lesson plan uses an EDSITEment-created Greek alphabet animation to help students "decode" the inscription on the Olympic medal. Because the Olympic medal is both a familiar and mysterious object for students, it presents an ideal prompt to build basic literacy in the Greek alphabet. Thus, this lesson uses the Athens 2004 medal inscription as an elementary "text" to help students practice reading Greek and to help reinforce the link between ancient Greek culture and the Olympic games.

Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

While the French had kept their end of the bargain by completing the statue itself, the Americans had still not fulfilled their commitment to erect a pedestal. In this lesson, students learn about the effort to convince a skeptical American public to contribute to the effort to erect a pedestal and to bring the Statue of Liberty to New York.

Help clarify the nature of symbols for your students as they study the Statue of Liberty, complete research on a national symbol, and use their research to communicate a message of their own.

Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.

Walt Whitman sought to create a new and distinctly American form of poetry. His efforts had a profound influence on subsequent generations of American poets. In this lesson, students will explore the historical context of Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and will have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.

Clues to Walt Whitman's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse may be found in his Notebooks, now available online from the American Memory Collection. In an entry to be examined in this lesson, Whitman indicated that he wanted his poetry to explore important ideas of a universal scope (as in the European tradition), but in authentic American situations and settings using specific details with direct appeal to the senses.

After an overview of the events surrounding Paul Revere's famous ride, this lesson challenges students to think about the reasons for that fame. Using both primary and secondhand accounts, students compare the account of Revere's ride in Longfellow's famous poem with actual historical events, in order to answer the question: why does Revere's ride occupy such a prominent place in the American consciousness?

Poems, classic and contemporary, make good company for your students. They can also serve as the inspiration for some terrific writing.