Poetry Curriculum
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.
Dr. Seuss
Anglo Saxon Riddles
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Shakespeare
The Metaphysicals
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British Ballads
American Ballads
The Romantics
The Moderns
American Pop Standards
The Postmoderns: Billy Collins;
70s singer-songwriter lyricism and the underground canon;
And yes, Rap, the only major living form of popular social poetry
Prophetic speech
1. Teaching with Dr. Seuss
- - -
To a Waterfowl
BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
The Bridge: A Poem
Hart Crane
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Craig Raine
The Task
William Cowper
God's Grandeur
The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Homes of England, by Felicia Hemans
Upon Appleton House - Marvell
Among Schoolchildren; Easter, 1916; Sailing to Byzantium; The Wild Swans at Coole- Yeats
Tennyson - Tithonus
To Althea, From Prison - Richard Lovelace
The Widow's Lament in Springtime; Spring and All
William Carlos Williams
The Collar
George Herbert
Easter-Wings
George Herbert
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
BY ROBERT HERRICK
La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to A Nightingale - Keats
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
Frost at Midnight
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens
The White Man's Burden
Rudyard Kipling
The Blessed Damozel - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Deserted Village
Oliver Goldsmith
For the Union Dead
Robert Lowell
Ars Poetica
BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
A Noiseless Patient Spider
I Hear America Singing
Walt Whitman
Mac Flecknoe
John Dryden
To an Athlete Dying Young
A. E. Housman
Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Church Going
Philip Larkin
The Sick Rose
William Blake
Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Canonization
John Donne
The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Ezra Pound