Introduction to Poetry: How to Begin a Poetry Unit

You’ve looked at your curriculum guide, and the moment you’ve been dreading has finally appeared: it’s time to teach poetry. Maybe you’ve even overcome some of your initial fears by reading our post about how poetry doesn’t have to be intimidating (where we remind you you’re definitely smart enough to teach it).

But where do you start? Do you just dive right in?

When we teach short stories, we do tend to dive right in, focusing on our first set of literary devices. But you definitely need an introduction to poetry. 

For one thing, your students need an introduction to poetry because some of them are just as intimidated as you are (or were). They need this daunting genre demystified, and they need someone to tell them yes, they can do it.

But an introduction to poetry is also helpful because poetry is a very different style of writing than the prose we’re all so used to. Sentence structures are often inverted, high-level vocabulary features prominently (and can’t be skipped over), and the genre incorporates multiple senses in a way that other types of literature do not. Our students need a few low-stakes days to adjust.

Now, we should start with a disclaimer right off the bat: if you’re working with below-grade-level students, this may not be the post for you. When you’re just trying to get your students read anything, poetry may not be an area you want to focus on intensely. Working in a poem here and there as part of a thematic unit will likely work much better (spoken from experience).

We’re focusing here on classes like AP English Literature (and PreAP/honors English courses) where a relatively in-depth study of poetry is required. In our AP Literature course, we spent 9–10 weeks focused exclusively on poetry, and, to avoid making ourselves completely miserable for those 10 weeks, we devoted the entire first week to our introduction to poetry.

We’ve outlined what we covered during that first week, inspired largely by Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, which you should definitely grab a copy of if you can—we learned a lot!

Our Overall Goals for Our Introduction to Poetry

When introducing poetry to our AP students, we wanted them to end the week understanding three things:

1. You can read poetry and be successful.
2. Poetry doesn’t have to be boring.
3. Helpful tools make navigating the genre easier.

We knew we’d be diving deeply into poetic devices in the weeks to come, so instead, our introduction to poetry was all about acclimating students to the genre. We wanted to equip them with confidence, some level of curiosity, and resources (like a dictionary, a literary terms list, and our go-to study guide) that would help them be successful.

Why Take a “Traditional” Introduction to Poetry Approach?

There are countless great resources and ideas out there for engaging students with poetry and helping them see its relevance to their lives: many teachers encourage their students to write poetry or to analyze lyrics of a song they like. But this isn’t the approach we took.

Part of the reason is our own personalities: we never liked being forced to write poetry ourselves, and we were wildly uninterested in reading novice poetry that dripped with teenage angst or awkward rhymes (sorry, students).

But we also strive to be practical, and what our students needed most was lots of practice analyzing (and writing about) the kinds of poems they’d encounter on the AP exam. They had a lot to learn, and we wanted to establish our academic focus from the start. We followed a straightforward routine of analysis and discussion, doing our best to select poems that would engage students in lively discussions.

A Structured Outline for Our Introduction to Poetry

Our preferred format for structured AP Literature discussions is a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation that alternates between presenting students with “need-to-know” information and asking discussion questions to get them to engage with the text.

We realized early on that providing students with a physical copy of the poem to annotate and finding audio versions of each poem (except for one, which we’ll discuss below) are crucial to setting students up for success.

Here’s the outline of our introduction to poetry discussion, which takes 4–5 class periods:

Day 1: Why Read Poetry?

We start by acknowledging that reading poetry is uncomfortable to many students who may be wondering why these writers can’t just say what they mean.

We loved what our textbook had to say in answer to this question: “it is central to existence, something that we are better off for having and without which we are spiritually impoverished.” 

Ah, yes. Speaks to our literary souls.

Day 1: What Is Poetry?

The quotation above may have spoken to our literary souls, but probably didn’t mean much to our students on Day 1. We wanted to start with a definition, but poetry is, of course, one of those terms that is difficult to define (and often defined as “not prose”).

Turning to our textbook again, we went with poetry “is a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language.”

To illustrate this point, we look at William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”).

This is a great starting point for students. It’s fairly accessible and likely a poem they’ve encountered before. The message is relatively straightforward, and it helps to illustrate our key point. Sure, Shakespeare could have just said, “You’re so beautiful that I want to capture your beauty forever in my poem.” It’s a nice compliment, but it doesn’t quite have the same power as the full fourteen lines.

Pro-Tip: If you’re looking for an introduction to poetry that is geared more toward PreAP or honors-level students, who are less likely to have encountered Shakespeare’s sonnets, this activity, in which students engage in a full-class close reading of Sonnet 18, is an effective way to introduce students to Shakespeare’s language.

Day 2: Poetry’s Purpose: To Create an Experience

One of the things that makes poetry so powerful is that it doesn’t merely convey information. It uses language to create an experience for the reader. We think this is what the editors of our textbooks were referring to when they said that without poetry, we are “spiritually impoverished.”

To bring this idea to life for our students, we look at Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham,” focusing on how the details the speaker focuses on shape a reader’s understanding of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama differently than a traditional historic account would.

Students really like this poem: it is accessible and discusses a topic many of them are familiar with, and they find the mother’s grief moving.

Day 2: Poetry Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful to Be Effective

This is such an important point for students to grasp. Many of us have a misconception of poetry that it’s boring: it’s just flowery language about nature and love. Who cares?

But some of the most effective poems are actually far from beautiful.

One of our absolute favorite poems, which we taught all 14 years that we taught AP Literature, is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” The poem describes the horrific death of a World War I soldier caught in a gas attack before he is able to put his mask on, and it ends with the speaker’s scathing criticism of the “old lie” that dying in war is “sweet and beautiful.”

Our students loved this poem. It really hammers in all the points we’d made so far, and numerous students identified it as their favorite text we read each year. It’s a great poem for close reading: students understand what’s happening fairly easily, which allows us to dive into the techniques Owen uses to create such a powerful effect.

For several years, we also looked at Robert Hayden’s “The Whipping” at this point in our discussion. It’s a powerful and effective poem that is far from beautiful, depicting the generational cycle that often drives physical abuse. But it’s a tough read, and you’ll want to be sensitive to whether it’s appropriate for your students. We ended up moving away from it, partly because of time limitations but also because we became aware of students in our population who were victims of child abuse.

Day 3: How to Read a Poem

Once we’ve laid the foundation of what poetry is and why it has value, we can get more practical. Going over tips for students on how to read a poem, both by themselves as they worked through their study guides and aloud may seem unnecessary, but to many students the thought of reading a work, even one as short as a poem, more than once is completely foreign. We then practice with Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” asking multiple students to read the poem aloud and concluding by either reading it ourselves or playing an audio recording.

Not only is this a thought-provoking poem, as a young soldier reflects on killing someone who could have been his friend in other circumstances, but it’s a good poem for students to practice with as the halting syntax contributes to the sense of hesitation and confusion the speaker feels about what has just happened. Students are also interested to see how different voices read the poem aloud, especially when compared to a professional reading.

For many years, we had students read every poem aloud, but in later years, we found it more valuable to primarily rely on audio recordings so that students’ deliveries didn’t interfere with understanding. Depending on your students and the time you have available, either approach has its benefits.

Day 3: How to Paraphrase a Poem

Still using “The Man He Killed,” we walk our students through the process of paraphrasing a poem, using a dictionary to look up key words (we prefer Collins Dictionary since it includes both British and American definitions, helpful when you’re analyzing poetry) and then rephrasing the poem in their own words, not just giving us “the gist.”

This is an important part of the preparation students do before every discussion, and while at times tedious, it really helps our students to understand the text, making for better discussions about how poets convey their purpose. Students don’t always enjoy it, but they get much better at discussing poetry. (And to be honest, so have we.)

Day 3: Poems Have a Speaker and Occasion

Another part of the preparation our students do before every discussion is identifying the poem’s speaker—the persona speaking the words of the poem—and occasion—the circumstances that caused the speaker to say the words of the poem.

After reviewing the terms, we practice identifying them with “The Man He Killed.”

Not only is this helpful in terms of students’ basic comprehension of the poem, but it emphasizes the point that the speaker is not the poet, a misconception that can get in the way of students’ understanding in more advanced poems where the speaker’s views are different from those of the poet. It also just makes for more mature writing about poems!

Day 4: Poems Have a Central Purpose

The final step students complete in preparing for discussion each week is making an initial attempt to identify the poem’s central purpose (why the poet decided to write the poem, often different from why the speaker decided to say the poem). This is quite possibly the most difficult step for students, sometimes because it is challenging, but other times because they overcomplicate it. We find it helpful to give students an “in other words” for this: in other words, what was the poet trying to accomplish by writing this poem? 

It’s crucial that students understand that poems have a purpose that is not necessarily a theme. Because we spend so much time in AP Literature focusing on theme statements (or, as the College Board calls it, “the meaning of the work as a whole”), students are determined to write a theme for every single text they write in our class.

This can really limit students on the Free-Response Questions about a poem (Q1) and a prose excerpt (Q2), however. Because many poems are written to convey an experience rather than to share an insight about life, forcing a theme statement for every poem really limits students’ interpretations.

Other possible “purposes” for a poem? To tell a story, reveal human character, to impart a vivid impression of a scene, to express a mood or an emotion, or to convey vividly some idea or attitude, just to name a few.

We wrap up our discussion of “The Man He Killed” by having students practice identifying the purpose.

Days 4-5: Literary Terms (or Poetic Devices) are a Means to an End

Once students have a clear understanding of the basic facts of a poem—the who, what, when, where, and why—we can look at the how.

We help students to see that once they identify the poem’s purpose, they can look at how the poet conveyed that purpose, and this is where allllll those literary terms they know come in. In “The Man He Killed,” the dramatic framework of having the speaker reflect on an experience is the primary device; the use of dashes and halting syntax conveys his confusion over the experience.

Helping students to identify the purpose before they identify literary terms is essential in preparing them to write the poetry analysis essay (Q1). When students start with literary devices, they often wind up trying to connect the rhyme scheme to a theme, and this rarely works out well. Knowing the purpose allows them to ask, “Does this device help to get that purpose across?”

We wrap up the “teaching” part of our week by putting everything together using A. E. Housman’s “Is my team plowing.” Since the poem has two speakers, we assign two students to read the poem aloud, then assign individual students to paraphrase each stanza and to identify the speaker, occasion, and purpose.

The poem is fairly accessible to students, but more importantly, it speaks to (a) the value of reading closely, and (b) the point that poetry isn’t boring. Perceptive readers are delighted to discover that the poem is about someone who is now sleeping with his dead best friend’s former sweetheart. Oh, the drama!

Additional Poems to Practice Putting It All Together

Depending on how much time you have available for your introduction to poetry, it can be helpful to end this short unit with a poem or two that allow students to practice everything you’ve talked about. While still trying to keep the poems relatively accessible, we did level them up just a little bit for this activity. Here are three that worked well for us over the years:

“Introduction to Poetry,” by Billy Collins

We actually most often used this poem later in our poetry unit to discuss figurative language (since that’s where our textbook placed it), but it also works really well here because it illustrates the point that poetry must be experienced rather than beaten to death for quick and easy answers. Students also really like it because it speaks to the feelings they are likely having at the end of an introduction to poetry unit!

“Mirror,” by Sylvia Plath

This presentation of a woman watching her youth fade away is told from the perspective of the mirror, making for an interesting discussion of the speaker while evoking the sadness of seeing someone struggle to love herself (while recognizing ourselves in her as well).

Break of Day,” by John Donne

We love John Donne, so we were thrilled that our textbook featured him heavily (we hope you’re ready to hear lots more about him from us). This particular poem provides students with a nice challenge (that is still more accessible than many of his other poems) at the end of the week, especially when it comes to discussing speaker, occasion, and purpose. We also like that it’s about two lovers parting ways at daybreak, reinforcing our point that poetry doesn’t have to be boring.

Our introduction to poetry week usually ends up being one of our favorites throughout the year, in part because we really like the poems, and students do, too. Keeping the focus on the basics allows them to experience success early in the unit, and the time we spend reviewing how to complete the study guide they complete for each poem results in better student work over the course of the semester.

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And if you’d like a fully editable quiz to go along with our go-to list of literary devices, you can pick it up here.