Teaching poetry - help!!!

[ShadyLane]

I teach a literature class of 16 and 17 year olds.

Soon I have an opportunity to give them a short course in poetry - kind of a "Poetry 101" with poems from across the whole history of poetry.

Thing is, I only have time to cover about 15 poems.

So, if you could pick 15 poems to give a flavour of "Poetry", which would you choose?

I know the Greeks and Romans were big poets, but I've been told to start with Chaucer.

[stlukesguild]

What are the limitations as to the length of the poems?

You might do Spenser's Muiopotmos as a mock-epic... making reference to... even looking at the invocations to the muses in Virgil and Homer. Certainly a Shakespearean sonnet. Something by Donne. I'd throw in a few less expected such as Thomas Traherne's Wonder and something by Robert Herrick (perhaps A Delight in Disorder). You'll probably want something by each of the great British Romantics. Blake-The Tyger, Coleridge- Kublai Khan, Byron- She Walks in Beauty... , Wordsworth- Tintern Abbey, Keats- Ode on a Grecian Urn, Shelley- Ozymandias... Then? Whitman's Captain my Captain, Poe's The Raven?, something by Dickinson surely, Frost's Road Not Taken, Yeats' When you are Old (which you can compare with Ronsard's Quand vous serez..., Eliot's Hollow Men... All of this is limited to English language literature but I'd surely want to throw in something to suggest the achievements of poets outside of the English-speaking world: something by Baudelaire, Verlaine, perhaps Rilke.

[JBI]

1) Sonnet 138 by Shakespeare
2) The Flea by John Donne
3) To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robbert Herrick
4) Jordan (I) by George Herbert
5) Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard by Thomas Gray
6) The Tyger by William Blake
7) Lines (Tintern Abbey) by William Wordsworth
8) Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
9) To Autumn by John Keats
10) Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
11) Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
12) Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
13) The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
14) Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
15) After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost


That is a pretty cliché list, but I put a little variation on it. I would have put contemporary poets, but you need to have them in a text book in order to use them, as their works are still under copyright. I wish I could have put more female poets on the list too, but for the most part, English poetry by women didn't really take off until modernism. Also, I didn't include Yeats because most of his good poems are on old age, and I don't know how well that would have gone over with the crowd.

[ShadyLane]

No Larkin? Auden? Ginsberg?

Let's say more like 20 poems then...

[JBI]

No Larkin? Auden? Ginsberg?

Let's say more like 20 poems then...

Those guys are subject to copyright, meaning you need a book for everyone in the class, or need to pay royalties.

[ShadyLane]

Not to sound like a jerk, but I work at a fancy-*** private school with a LOT of books in the storeroom. So really any poets can be accommodated...

Thanks for these suggestions! more please...

[JBI]

Alright then, for the last 5:

No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats
Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop
In a Dark Time by Roethke
Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney
Carry her Over the Water by W. H. Auden

Still, 20 is too hard to work with.

[mercymyqueen]

Romantics, romantics, romantics

Girls dig 'em. All my lit classes did, especially at that age. Throw in some gorey post-WWI or ancient stuff in the mix for the guys. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and some portions of ancient classics are musts,

[Serenity5815]

I had a really good teacher who showed us these:

1. "I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines" - Edna St. Vincent Millay (a really good one to start with)
2. "The Flea" - John Donne
3. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - TS Eliot
4. "I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died" - Emily Dickinson

Those are the best I can think of off the top of my head, but we were allowed to look at any ones from an evil book called "The Bedford Introduction to Literature." A new edition just came out, but we had the sixth, and it offered a lot of different poems by many different authors, so you might want to check it out if you can. I wish I had my old notebook of poetry drills (yes, drills), which would have a lot of titles. And as much as I hate to admit it, the poetry drills taught me more than I ever wanted to know about poetry.

Also, any of Shakespeare's sonnets would be good, but you might want to start with "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day", which is pretty straight foward.