Poetry Support

eWriting > Poetry Support > 7.1

• Secondary
• Stage 4
• Stage 5
• Stage 6
• Teaching Strategies
• Activities
• Ballad Stage 4
• Ballad Stage 5
• Ballad Stage 6
• Lyrics Stage 4
• Additional Stage 4
• Elegy Stage 5
• Ode Stage 6
• Alternate Task Ode
• Epic Stage 4
• Epic Stage 5
• Stage 6
• Lyrics Stage 4/5
• Sonnets Stage 6
• Satire Stage 5
• Activity Stage 4
• Ballad/Music Stage 4

7.1 Poetry for Secondary Students

Poetry, first and foremost, is meant for enjoyment. It is, as we know, a literary form composed of carefully chosen words placed deliberately in a certain order for a certain purpose and as such, has the power to attract and engage the reader at an affective level. Therefore, the teacher needs to come to poetry with a thorough understanding of how it is generated, and a real enthusiasm for it, in order that the feeling, enjoyment and purpose of poetry are grasped by the students.

Moreover, the teacher has to be careful not to give the message that poetry is a hard and irrelevant task into day's English classroom and something to be avoided at all costs. The teacher needs to remember that so many of the students in the class are probably completely absorbed in their pop music, computer games, favourite television shows, local football clubs and the like and have no vision outside of these pursuits and, maybe, in some cases, are struggling with their literacy skills. Despite these factors and others, there must be, for all students, not only enjoyment, but relevance, in the poetry lesson.

Further, poetry, by definition, is a communication of feelings, which not only reflects the poet's personal experience but universal experience as well. Therefore, it should help the readers to make sense of life and their life experiences and assist them to reach down into their own feeling areas to understand their own experiences, and perhaps confront certain feelings that they have denied in themselves, or not understood.

Lastly, poetry study in the secondary school carries the idea that poetry is an art and craft just like other arts and crafts to which students are exposed. Therefore, the thrust of the poetry lesson in the classroom should be to lead the students to a realisation that the poet is shaping a meaning with a compression of words and that these words embody feelings. Just as Art teachers initially lead their students to feel what is happening in a painting and then to appreciate how the artist has achieved this feeling, so poetry teachers do no less with the carefully crafted words shaped into the poem which has been selected for the lesson. Once these ends are achieved, then teachers can lead the students to consider skills, values and attitudes contained in the poem.

Most importantly, the skills, values and attitudes embodied in a poem gradually unfold to the students in a poetry lesson through the methods the teacher uses and the activities that flow out of the lesson. So method and types of activities can make or break the poetry experience.