Poetry Curriculum

[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

Poetry is currently separate from the rest of the literature curriculum because it is undeniably insular. Most poems are not about worldview or history or narrative or society. Poetry is about itself and perpetual things: God, life and death, sex, aging, the seasons. (Poems that do directly speak to history and society are included in the history curriculum.)

This curriculum is intended to initiate students into that rarest of traits: genuine appreciation of poetry.

I hated poetry in middle school and the lights did not flash on until I was in college. Thank you, Dr. Grieser. I began to read poetry voraciously, and compose on occasion.

Because of this, I don't expect young students to have aesthetic appreciation for fine letters. This curriculum might be better suited for someone in upper secondary or college who somehow has been struck by words and wants to understand what has just happened to them.

Before we can get to poetry's fundamental role in reshaping not just human society but man's relationship to God and the cosmos, it's good to appreciate play with sound and symbol for their own sake.

Elemental Poetry

Dr. Seuss

Riddles

Reading Meters

Metaphors, Conceits & Allegories

Alliteration

Consonance & Assonance

Synecdoche & Metonymy

Hyperbole & Subtlety

Personification

Voice

Imagery

Utterance

Haiku

Ballad

Lyric

Elegies & Odes

Pastorals

Sonnets

Couplets & Epigrams

Epic

Prophecy

Smash Glass for Poems

In case of emergency, break open this list:

Emergency Poems

Canons of English Poetry

The Postmodern Academics

After World War II, poetry became regulated through the university credential apparatus. As such, it rapidly lost almost all social relevance and vanished from public life except for those who participate in the carefully sterilized environment of the academy.

Anglo-American Pop Lyricism

Rock n roll, 70s singer-songwriter lyricism and the underground canon, art pop, the bohemian bourgeois

Rap

Independent Rock

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400)

John Gower (1330–1408)

Thomas Hoccleve (1368–1426)

John Lydgate (1370–1451)

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542)

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547)

George Gascoigne (1534–1577)

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)

Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)

Michael Drayton (1563–1631)

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

John Donne (1572–1631)

George Chapman (1559–1634)

Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645)

Robert Herrick (1591–1674)

George Herbert (1593–1633)

Richard Lovelace (1617–1657)

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)

Katherine Philips (1632–1664)

John Milton (1608–1674)

John Dryden (1631–1700)

Anne Finch (1661–1720)

Matthew Prior (1664–1721)

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)

James Thomson (1700–1748)

Edward Young (1683–1765)

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

Thomas Gray (1716–1771)

William Collins (1721–1759)

Christopher Smart (1722–1771)

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)

William Cowper (1731–1800)

George Crabbe (1754–1832)

Robert Burns (1759–1796)

William Blake (1757–1827)

Mary Robinson (1757–1800)

Charlotte Smith (1749–1806)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)

Lord Byron (1788–1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

John Keats (1795–1821)

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838)

Thomas Hood (1799–1845)

Thomas Moore (1779–1852)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

Emily Brontë (1818–1848)

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

Herman Melville (1819–1891)

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896)

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

William Morris (1834–1896)

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

A. E. Housman (1859–1936)

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)

John Davidson (1857–1909)

Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917)

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

John Masefield (1878–1967)

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Hart Crane (1899–1932)

Shakespeare

The Metaphysicals

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British Ballads

American Ballads

The Romantics

The Moderns

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