Unlike the literary study of poetry, embedding ideas from authoritative sources (like major poets) into our writing can add persuasive power, without requiring lots of experience studying poems.

So, let's discuss and analyze our Unit 1 poetry, a handout (to be distributed in print during class) featuring the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Keats, and the Symbolists Yeats, Frost, and Hopkins. These inquiries may assist in plans to write well-known thinkers' breakthrough ideas and other probing quotes into our portfolio revision of Paper 1.

Understanding poems well often begins by thinking through any of the following:

Characterize the speaker, describing the kind of people or group they are: their concerns and values, hopes and fears, using passages from the poem as evidence

Identify the occasion (meaning the background situation ... understanding that sometimes what occasions the poem is personal, self-motivated, as if the speaker has a compulsion to say what's being said)

Interpret the poem, which can mean explaining theme(s) and central messages but doesn’t necessarily have to; you can explicate lines and phrases that position you to analyze imagery (especially visual images and the broader setting, as both time and place), unpack symbols, identify historical and cultural allusions and explain their uses within the poem, even decipher the plot if it's a narrative poem

Identify and describe shifts in tone (and/or the speaker's attitude), especially ironic reversals. Similar to good movies and fiction, poems may develop heightened tension and conflict, often leading to a climax.

Here are the poems:

802 Poets on Unit 1-education-identity-and more.pdf