Poetry Forum

Which poet's works do you most enjoy teaching? Why? Are there any particular poems by this poet that you've found are especially meaningful to or popular with students?  

Hmmm.."popular" and "meaningful" is a hard thing for me to parse, but here are some of the poets whom I've had the most success in teaching"  

Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwin, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Dorotohy Paker, Billy Collins, Lee Young-Lee, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Samuel Coleridge, Randall Jarrell, Emily Dickinson, Ted Koozer, Charles Simic, Carl Sanburg, Gwendolyn Brooks.

Frost, Frost, Frost!  I threaten bodily harm to any of my students who have negative things to say about him LOL  (I'm JUST joking, by the way!). 

 I've found that most of the poems that we study the students are interested in and have lots to say about.  The most popular are "Fire and Ice," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Design," "The Road Not Taken," and "Birches."

Frost has always been a favorite of mine because his style and knack for description and invoking nostalgia is magnificent.  Also, many of his poems I find very peaceful and calming, which I enjoy. 

I love to teach William Blake. He is often glossed over as a "proto-Romantic" figure en route to studying Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, etc., but he has a social vision that students really tap into. Blake's verse is accessible and even childlike in poems like "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" and these two are a good way to build student confidence in their poetry explication skills.

After the easy ones, go on to teach other poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience like the two versions of "The Chimney Sweeper" and "London." These are scathing attacks on middle-class complacency at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The other wonderful thing about Blake is that the poems in Songs are accompanied by gorgeous, hand-colored etchings by Blake himself. For him, poetry and visual art were intertwined.

Enjoy! 

Another favorite author is Sylvia Plath.  Her poems always generate lots of discussion.  Her biography does, too!