Intro to Teaching Poetry: It Doesn’t Have to Be Intimidating

“Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said.”

We encountered Edwin Arlington Robinson’s wise words in our textbook’s chapter on figurative language as an example of paradox, and they’ve stuck with us because we can’t imagine a more perfect definition of poetry.

It also explains why teaching poetry is both highly valuable and utterly terrifying.

Students are rarely excited when we begin teaching poetry. Poetry is the ultimate exercise in reading between the lines, in unlocking what a writer is really saying. At face value, it can seem confusing at best and pointless at worst (who cares this much about a tree?).

And depending on our background, we may feel the same way. Just because we’re teaching poetry doesn’t mean we understood poetry when we were in school, yet now we have to be an authority and engage students who just aren’t interested.

But when our students successfully unlock the meaning of the right poem, they get it. Poetry has the power to pack an emotional punch in a way that prose (and certainly everyday speech) just doesn’t, and seeing our students get that makes teaching poetry worth it.

We would hardly have called ourselves experts on poetry when we first started teaching, but 14 years of teaching AP Literature meant we had to figure it out, and we came to really enjoy it. But teaching poetry certainly takes work on your part and your students’ parts, so we’re unpacking the basic need-to-knows when it comes to teaching poetry in the hopes that it makes you feel a little less terrified.

Why Teaching Poetry Matters

Poetry’s complexity may make us wonder why we should bother teaching poetry at all. When we’re desperately trying to engage students, it seems self-defeating to dive wholeheartedly into something we know they’re going to struggle with. And we’ll admit: we spent a lot less time teaching poetry in our non-AP classes. But there are a few reasons we should make room for poetry in our curriculum, no matter what level of students we teach.

1. Poetry is beautiful and has the power to enrich our students’ lives. Why wouldn’t we share it with them?
2. Students are unlikely to seek poetry out on their own. BookTok may entice our non-readers into a popular book on occasion, but it’s unlikely that most of our students are going to sit down to read poetry if no one requires them to.
3. Poetic language is rich, which makes it well worth the effort of a close read. We’ve all had the experience of an English teacher who beats a relatively straightforward text to death, analyzing it far beyond its ability to bear worthwhile insights, but poetry packs loads of meaning into a short space, offering us plenty to discuss.
4. Poems are challenging to understand but can be fully unpacked within a class period. When we’re fighting to hold students’ attention, a short piece of text that can be read in less than a minute is gold: there’s no worrying about students who didn’t do the reading. It’s all right there, beginning to end, and everyone can participate in the experience.
5. Understanding poetry requires students to develop critical thinking and vocabulary skills, both of which top our list of skills to teach.
6. Poetry now appears on the Digital SAT, so our college-bound students need experience with it, whether they’re in AP Literature or not. Thankfully, these questions about poems are relatively straightforward, focusing on comprehension and structure, but because poetry is challenging, students find these questions particularly intimidating.

Selecting Poems to Teach in High School and Middle School

While we have different approaches for selecting poems to teach in AP-level and standard-level courses, the key to both is looking for high-interest poems. Because students are resistant to reading poetry, we need to show them that poetry can be fun (or at least interesting), that it’s not just a collection of confusing lines about nature.

In our standard-level courses, we tend to take a more thematic approach to selecting poems. We’ve done a standard poetry unit (devoting several weeks to explicitly teaching a variety of poems), but we’ve been more successful when we’ve weaved in a poem that thematically relates to a larger unit. For example, we had students read William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (1875) as part of a larger unit on fate and free will. Students gained exposure to poetry, but it wasn’t as daunting because it was mixed in with more accessible texts.

In AP Literature, we spent a large part of second semester on poetry, and we prioritized variety, trying to show students the broad range of topics about which poetry has something to say. You’ll want to prioritize variety not only in subject matter but also in age.

There are many “need to read” older poems (and, our students need to read older poetry since, thanks to public domain, the SAT’s poetry selections tend to fit into this category), and if you, as the teacher, find poetry intimidating, teaching these older poems means you’ll be able to find commentary as you build your confidence. But you’ll also want to mix in some more contemporary poems: students need to see that poetry isn’t just for the “olden” days and speaks to today’s issues as well, but you’ll also force them to do more thinking since newer poetry doesn’t have decades of commentary available online for students to access.

Where Do I Fit Poetry into My Curriculum?

There are four great options for fitting poetry into your curriculum, any of which will benefit your students.

Option 1: Skills-Focused Poetry Unit

This was our preferred approach for AP Literature. We devoted each week of our unit to a different set of literary devices, focusing on connecting those devices to a poem’s meaning. Many of our students were not native English speakers, and they needed quite a bit of practice with poetry in preparation for the AP exam, so this approach was effective in building their ability to analyze poetry successfully.

The downside of this approach is that students can get weary of poetry. There are a lot of poetic devices, so this approach takes quite a bit of time. We started breaking our poetry unit up with a novel in the middle and eliminating some of the less “important” devices.

Additionally, because skills are the organizing factor, the content of the poems is all over the place. While some teachers might consider this a con, we found it helped maintain student interest: our discussions ranged widely from day to day.

Option 2: Content-Focused Poetry Unit

If you prefer a more holistic approach to your poetry analysis, organizing your poetry units by themes or essential questions can provide greater unity in your discussions and opportunities to compare themes, tone, and perspectives. It’s easier to move more quickly through a poetry unit with this approach, but you’ll want to review key terms at the beginning of the unit or put some care into identifying where they first appear in your unit so students have the tools necessary to successfully analyze each poem.

This approach tends to work best with students who already have some proficiency with poetic devices, perhaps because you’re part of a vertical team that spends a lot of time discussing poetry or your school offers a poetry class most of your students would have taken.

Option 3: Part of an Essential Questions Unit

This was our preferred approach for non-AP students. Instead of spending weeks on a skill that students find challenging, we sprinkled poetry analysis throughout our other units, including a poem here and there as it related to our larger themes. Students still got practice with reading and analyzing poetry, but because our goal was exposure rather than expertise, we experienced more success when poetry was an occasional challenge rather than the focus itself.

Option 4: Single Lessons Between Units

Poetry is perfect for those days when you’re between units or leading up to a break or long weekend and you need an activity that can be completed in a single class period. Students can read, paraphrase, analyze, and discuss—even write about—a short poem within one 50-ish-minute class period, and whether they do it individually, in groups, or as a full class, it provides worthwhile and meaningful practice grappling with language. We’d recommend particularly high-interest (hello, Billy Collins) or brain-teasing (looking at you, Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors”) poems for these one-off lessons.

What Skills Do I Need to Teach?

Great question. The traditional “literary devices” are, perhaps, most relevant when it comes to teaching poetry, and the list can feel overwhelming. There are certainly a number of lists you can pull (we, of course, recommend our own) and strategies for organizing, but we found the following structure to be particularly helpful (credit to Perrine’s Literature).

[Side note: It’s helpful to focus your time, effort, and energy on literary devices that help to convey the meaning of the work as a whole. While there may be multiple-choice questions about sound devices, rhythm, and meter, they very rarely convey the meaning of the work as a whole, which is what students will need to discuss in their poetry essay (Q1, which is worth a whole lot more than a couple multiple-choice questions!]

1. Why and How to Read Poetry: We started with a look at what poetry is, why it’s worthwhile, and best practices for reading it (individually and aloud).
2. Form and Structure: We tackle this early in our poetry unit because understanding poetic forms can help students navigate the challenge of working out meaning. Students, particularly AP students, need to know the sonnet form (English/Shakespearean and Italian/Petrarchan).
3. Denotation, Connotation, and Imagery: We prioritized vocabulary when it came to poetry (more on that below), so zeroing in on key words early on in our unit was important. Imagery is also good to discuss early on: not only is it common in poetry, but students are fairly familiar with it, so they need less practice with it than they will for other devices.
4. Figurative Language: The other key player when it comes to poetic devices is figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, synecdoche, and metonymy). Students are fairly familiar with simile, metaphor, and personification, but they need practice moving from merely identifying examples of these devices to discussing their effect on the poem’s meaning.
5. Symbolism: A poetry unit isn’t complete without a discussion of symbolism, but since it’s more challenging than other types of figurative language, we save this for the middle of our unit, when students have gained some experience (and confidence). Symbolism is great to discuss with poetry because it often takes an entire text to unpack a symbol’s meaning, far more efficient with poetry than with prose. Our textbook also included a couple examples of allegory, which is helpful since it’s a tough term to explain without a full novel, but we deemphasized it over the years since students started to overuse the term in their poetry analysis essays.
6. Irony, Hyperbole, Understatement, Paradox, and Allusion: These literary devices are crucial to spend time on because when missed, students take away the opposite meaning from what the poet intended. These are valuable tools for creating powerful effects, but students definitely need practice.
7. Tone: Another key player when it comes to understanding poetry, tone is worth spending some time on. Our textbook offered pairs of poems that tackled a similar topic but with different tones, which was valuable practice; however, as time demands increased, we shifted toward just discussing tone when it came up. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is a great one for this because it sounds like an insult if you misread the tone.
8. Sound Devices: While AP students do need a refresher on terms like alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme, we save these for the end of the unit because they’re rarely essential in carrying the meaning of a poem, and students need to have this emphasized for them. If you don’t make time to discuss that these are “icing on the cake” that can reinforce meaning and provide emphasis, you’ll read a lot of tough essays about how alliteration conveys a poem’s theme.
9. Rhythm and Meter: For full coverage of poetry, you’ll want to include an introduction to rhythm and meter, but rhythm and meter is challenging, which is why we saved it for the end (and skipped it some years). It can absolutely enhance students’ appreciation of a poem, and there are occasionally a question or two on standardized tests about common meters. BUT, it, again, doesn’t carry the meaning of a poem, and poetry can absolutely be appreciated without it, so we always emphasize to students that it’s good to know but not make or break.
10. Advanced Poetry: We always ended our skills-based unit with John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a “putting it all together” cap on what students had learned.

What If I’m Not Smart Enough to Teach Poetry?

Nonsense. You are definitely smart enough to teach poetry. And you are absolutely more prepared to tackle it than your students are.

But we get it, and we’ve had those moments of doubt ourselves. Poetry is hard, and it’s uncomfortable to teach something when you feel barely a step ahead of your students.

These are our best strategies that helped us feel like the expert in the room:

Our Favorite Strategies for Teaching Poetry

Choose a wide variety of high-interest poems.

We said it above, so we won’t belabor it here, but finding poems that will surprise or resonate with your students goes a long way toward increasing their willingness to engage with poetry.

Emphasize vocabulary.

One of the most impactful decisions we made when it came to teaching poetry was requiring our students to look up a lot of words for each poem. It’s not always fun, but when students truly understand the basic meaning of a poem and can paraphrase it, they’re in a much better place to move toward analysis. Additionally, looking so closely at the word level of a poem forces students to get beyond the “gist” and really dig into the nuances of meaning that are so important in poetry.

Pro tip: definitely at the beginning and quite possibly all along, we recommend preselecting the words students must look up. Students tend to assume they know what many words mean when they really should have been looking at the 8th definition rather than the first.

Focus on comprehension in independent assignments.

We’ll be the first to admit that for many years, we just assigned students the book questions for a poem as preparation for class discussion. But this was not a particularly effective strategy, in part because these are the “hard” questions that students often need help (from their peers, the Internet, and/or from us) answering. When we switched to having students complete a study guide that merely focused on comprehension, our class discussions were more effective.

Prioritize speaker, occasion, and purpose.

On students’ preparatory study guides, they had to look up important words, paraphrase the poem, and identify the poem’s speaker (the persona saying the words of the poem), occasion (the potentially fictional circumstances that led the speaker to say the words of the poem), and purpose (the poet’s reason for writing the poem, or what they were trying to convey).

When students could articulate these basic details, we were in a much better place for digging into the poet’s use of literary devices. It’s important also to emphasize that poems tend to have a purpose, which may be a theme but isn’t always a theme. Sometimes poems convey an experience rather than providing an insight about life, and when students think they always have to come up with a theme, they can set themselves up for weak analysis right from the outset.

Provide a copy of the text for students.

Because poetry relies so heavily on small details, it’s essential that students have the poem in front of them to refer to during discussion. It’s also helpful to provide a copy that students can annotate directly: having their notes and definitions next to the poem itself aids in their comprehension.

Have students analyze a poem in groups.

When we switched to remote learning during the pandemic, we started making heavy use of Canvas’s discussion boards, ultimately creating an assignment where students produced a piece of analytical writing in groups about a variety of texts. The poetry analysis paragraphs and essays they produced in their groups were, perhaps, some of the best: watching them work through the challenges of the poem with one another instead of with a teacher was rewarding, and those students who embraced the experience grew quite a bit in their reading and writing abilities that year.

Help students understand which devices carry the meaning of a poem.

When we toss students into poetry analysis without helping them understand that not all literary devices are equal, many of them gravitate toward what they most easily recognize. For many of them, this is rhyme and alliteration, but these are not devices that tend to carry meaning, which means students write literary analysis essays that are fairly ridiculous.

We started making it a priority to explain which devices could carry meaning and were thus worth discussing in an essay (denotation/connotation, form, figurative language, symbolism), and which devices were more like “icing on the cake” that provided a nice decorative finish but didn’t merit more than a passing mention in their commentary (sound devices, rhythm, and meter).

Directing our students toward the literary devices that would most enable them to be successful helped them to make bigger leaps in their ability to write effectively about poetry.

Have students listen to professional readings of poems.

For many years, we prioritized having students read poems aloud to improve their poetry reading skills. And this is certainly worth doing to some degree. But listening to a professional reader aids in comprehension far more than listening to a novice stumble through it. When we started playing professional readings, our students gained some additional insights to the poem that they had missed in their initial reading.

We also played multiple readings of the same poem to highlight the impact of different interpretations.

Teach students to think of poetry like a puzzle.

Students can, for the most part, work out the surface meaning of a poem. When they do this, encourage them to think of figuring out the “how” as a puzzle. If this is the meaning, then what are the literary devices that helped us to “get” that meaning. Starting to view poetry this way really helped Steph to appreciate it a lot more, and helping our students to see it this way can help them to find the “fun” in those bursts of insight instead of frustration at the hidden meaning.

Save time with epic poems and plays written in verse.

If you don’t have time to cover both poetry and a longer text, turn to epic poems like Homer’s Odyssey or Beowulf or toward Shakespeare’s plays. These stories in verse will engage your struggling readers more than a series of loosely related poems, and they’ll work for Q3 in your AP classes. But they’re also rich in the use of poetic devices, so you can have your students close read key passages in the same way you would have them analyze a poem.

Start interpretation with “positive” or “negative.”

When we ask students for their interpretation of a poem, it sounds like we’re asking them for a lot. But merely describing a tone as “positive” or “negative” is a great starting place in interpreting rather than merely paraphrasing. Many students find this an accessible starting point (and if that’s as far as they get, they can still write a competent essay) from which you can push them to find more precise adjectives.

Emphasize the value of form, especially for sonnets.

When students understand the way sonnet form reflects the organization of a poem, it becomes an essential tool for them in helping to unlock meaning. When they know to look for a shift between the octave and sestet of an Italian/Petrarchan sonnet or between the three quatrains of an English/Shakespearean sonnet, they gain a foothold for figuring out what the poem is saying.

Ask students what they notice and what impact it has.

Again, students can feel intimidated when we jump right into the big words and questions. But if we just ask them what stands out to them or what they notice, we can help them to build their analysis from their own interpretations, strengthening their confidence and pushing them toward more confidently being able to perform individual analysis.

Make modern connections whenever possible.

One of the biggest obstacles to poetry is how old and stuffy it seems. Whenever you can “translate” a poem into modern lingo or tie it to an element of modern culture, it helps students not only to understand that poem but to see poetry as accessible rather than beyond them. Talk about Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets in terms of toxic relationships. Compare “Dulce et Decorum Est” to the military recruitment ads that play in movie theaters or during professional sports games on TV. Warn students not to fall for the speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” if they meet him in a bar. Compare Sonnet 130 to a parody of Bruno Mars. When students realize that poets are fun (and, quite frankly, kind of sex-obsessed), poetry analysis becomes far less intimidating.

Our Top 8 Favorite Poems to Teach

We’ve explained why we love these poems so much in another post, but if you need a list to get you started, these are eight poems we’ve absolutely loved teaching.

1. “Barbie Doll,” by Marge Piercy
2. Literally anything by Billy Collins
3. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” by Wilfred Owen
4. “Hazel Tells LaVerne,” by Katharyn Howd Machan
5. “Is My Team Ploughing,” by A. E. Housman
6. Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
7. “To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell
8. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne

Teaching poetry is, of course, always going to be challenging. But as you build your skill and your repertoire of high-interest poems, teaching poetry can become highly rewarding and lead to some of your best, most engaging classroom discussions. If you’re teaching a class like AP Literature where poetry is essential to students’ performance on the end-of-year exam, you can’t be afraid of it because your students need lots of practice. If you’re teaching a class that requires less proficiency with poetry, it still provides opportunities for rich discussion, rigorous thinking, and impactful insights. We’re confident that you’ve got this.

Don’t recreate the wheel: we’ve refined our literary terms list over the years to the most essential terms students need to know for successful literary analysis, and the student-friendly definitions and examples make it a perfect resource for your poetry unit. One of our bestsellers, it includes a list of over 115 key literary terms in color or black-and-white that you can print for students or post on your LMS, links to five sets of Kahoot! review flashcards, and a literary terms test (with two versions to deter cheating).

If you have questions about what you’ve read here, we’d love to help! Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.