All human experience is the domain of poetry: poems can marvel at nature’s beauty, grieve over losses, poke fun at idiosyncrasies, reflect on life’s meaning, protest social problems, and celebrate relationships. Because of its vitality and variety, poetry has a tremendous potential to appeal to today’s students, as well as to engage them in understanding, delight, reflection, and creative response.

The unit encourages students to read and respond to poems, analyze techniques of poetry, write original works, and explore various masterpieces. More than 100 poems represent male and female poets from various regions and ethnic groups.

Students examine poems of many types including narrative poems, ballads, sonnets, concrete poems, haiku, and definition poems. They analyze literary tools including imagery, metaphor, simile, personification, symbolism, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, irony, paradox, allusion, and theme.

Academic activities include creative writing, journal response writing, dramatic reading, small- and large-group discussion, role-playing, critical reading and response, and student presentations and projects.