Chapter 5: Poetry

I love poetry. It is fun to read and you get so much more out of it than you might expect. I am a huge fan of the older poets like Shakespeare, and some of the early 20th century poets like Emerson, Sassoon, and Poe. There is something very therapeutic about poetry and another reason I love it so much is because I have always had a knack for it. The musicality of poetry is another thing that definitely draws me into it. Songs are poems as well and really well written songs can be read as well as being sung. Analyzing song lyrics was always a fun thing to do especially in middle and high school so that the poems relate more to the students.

Poetry is a great teaching tool and is a great way to teach description and how to teach putting emotions into your writing especially for young writers as well as the more seasoned ones. The extensive use of adjectives makes this a great way to teach the children how to paint a picture with their words, it also helps expand the vocabulary of both elementary and secondary students alike. The more advanced you get you can teach them how to use punctuation in much the same way. Teaching students about poetry is also very therapeutic because instead of writing a paragraph about how they feel they can do it in a more cut down and succinct manner.

I am a fan of free form poetry because it is a lot easier to work with and teach. You don’t have specific guidelines to follow which makes it more freeing for the kids as well. Moving into rhyming it becomes more difficult the higher up you get to rhyme certain words to make your poem work and becomes a more tedious task to take on. Working with more structure provides the higher level thinking as well as doing some rudimentary analysis of the poem like asking how the poem makes the kids feel or what images popped into their heads as they read it, and what they learned from it if there was even a real reason behind why the poem was written.

While poetry is great for its purely aesthetic feel having your students read poetry written on specific subjects such as history can give students a great insight as to how some of the people during the time felt about certain events instead of just reading about them from history books. British War poems give you a great look into how the general public felt about their sons being sent off to war and how sometimes they were inadequately prepared for battle and ended up dying in masses because of this. Some other poets write about issues such as Social Justice and these are great to introduce to older students like those in Middle and High School. By introducing them to poems like these they can get a better feeling for issues in the world and the times that they live in.