poem research assignment

EH -- Researching Poems: Strategies for Poetry Research

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Strategies for Poetry Research

Page Overview

This page addresses the research process -- the things that should be done before the actual writing of the paper -- and strategies for engaging in the process. Although this LibGuide focuses on researching poems or poetry, this particular page is more general in scope and is applicable to most lower-division college research assignments.

Before You Begin

Before beginning any research process, first be absolutely sure you know the requirements of the assignment. Things such as

the date the completed project is due
the due dates of any intermediate assignments, like turning in a working bibliography or notes
the length requirement (minimum word count), if any
the minimum number and types (for example, books or articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals) of sources required

These formal requirements are as much a part of the assignment as the paper itself. They form the box into which you must fit your work. Do not take them lightly.

When possible, it is helpful to subdivide the overall research process into phases, a tactic which

makes the idea of research less intimidating because you are dealing with sections at a time rather than the whole process
makes the process easier to manage
gives a sense of accomplishment as you move from one phase to the next

Characteristics of a Well-written Paper

Although there are many details that must be given attention in writing a research paper, there are three major criteria which must be met. A well-written paper is

Unified: the paper has only one major idea; or, if it seeks to address multiple points, one point is given priority and the others are subordinated to it.
Coherent: the body of the paper presents its contents in a logical order easy for readers to follow; use of transitional phrases (in addition, because of this, therefore, etc.) between paragraphs and sentences is important.
Complete: the paper delivers on everything it promises and does not leave questions in the mind of the reader; everything mentioned in the introduction is discussed somewhere in the paper; the conclusion does not introduce new ideas or anything not already addressed in the paper.

Basic Research Strategy

How to Research From Pellissippi State Community College Libraries: discusses the principal components of a simple search strategy.
Basic Research Strategies From Nassau Community College: a start-up guide for college level research that supplements the information in the preceding link. Tabs two, three, and four plus the Web Evaluation tab are the most useful for JSU students. As with any LibGuide originating from another campus, care must be taken to recognize the information which is applicable generally from that which applies solely to the Guide's home campus. .
Information Literacy Tutorial From Nassau Community College: an elaboration on the material covered in the preceding link (also from NCC) which discusses that material in greater depth. The quizzes and surveys may be ignored.

Things to Keep in Mind

Although a research assignment can be daunting, there are things which can make the process less stressful, more manageable, and yield a better result. And they are generally applicable across all types and levels of research.

1. Be aware of the parameters of the assignment: topic selection options, due date, length requirement, source requirements. These form the box into which you must fit your work.

2. Treat the assignment as a series of components or stages rather than one undivided whole.

devise a schedule for each task in the process: topic selection and refinement (background/overview information), source material from books (JaxCat), source material from journals (databases/Discovery), other sources (internet, interviews, non-print materials); the note-taking, drafting, and editing processes.
stick to your timetable. Time can be on your side as a researcher, but only if you keep to your schedule and do not delay or put everything off until just before the assignment deadline.

3. Leave enough time between your final draft and the submission date of your work that you can do one final proofread after the paper is no longer "fresh" to you. You may find passages that need additional work because you see that what is on the page and what you meant to write are quite different. Even better, have a friend or classmate read your final draft before you submit it. A fresh pair of eyes sometimes has clearer vision.

4. If at any point in the process you encounter difficulties, consult a librarian. Hunters use guides; fishermen use guides. Explorers use guides. When you are doing research, you are an explorer in the realm of ideas; your librarian is your guide.

A Note on Sources

Research requires engagement with various types of sources.

Primary sources: the thing itself, such as letters, diaries, documents, a painting, a sculpture; in lower-division literary research, usually a play, poem, or short story.
Secondary sources: information about the primary source, such as books, essays, journal articles, although images and other media also might be included. Companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias are secondary sources.
Tertiary sources: things such as bibliographies, indexes, or electronic databases (minus the full text) which serve as guides to point researchers toward secondary sources. A full text database would be a combination of a secondary and tertiary source; some books have a bibliography of additional sources in the back.

Accessing sources requires going through various "information portals," each designed to principally support a certain type of content. Houston Cole Library provides four principal information portals:

JaxCat online catalog: books, although other items such as journals, newspapers, DVDs, and musical scores also may be searched for.
Electronic databases: journal articles, newspaper stories, interviews, reviews (and a few books; JaxCat still should be the "go-to" portal for books). JaxCat indexes records for the complete item: the book, journal, newspaper, CD but has no records for parts of the complete item: the article in the journal, the editorial in the newspaper, the song off the CD. Databases contain records for these things.
Discovery Search: mostly journal articles, but also (some) books and (some) random internet pages. Discovery combines elements of the other three information portals and is especially useful for searches where one is researching a new or obscure topic about which little is likely to be written, or does not know where the desired information may be concentrated. Discovery is the only portal which permits simul-searching across databases provided by multiple vendors.
Internet (Bing, Dogpile, DuckDuckGo, Google, etc.): primarily webpages, especially for businesses (.com), government divisions at all levels (.gov), or organizations (.org). as well as pages for primary source-type documents such as lesson plans and public-domain books. While book content (Google Books) and journal articles (Google Scholar) are accessible, these are not the strengths of the internet and more successful searches for this type of content can be performed through JaxCat and the databases.

NOTE: There is no predetermined hierarchy among these information portals as regards which one should be used most or gone to first. These considerations depend on the task at hand and will vary from assignment o assignment.

The link below provides further information on the different source types.

Research Methods From Truckee Meadows Community College: a guide to basic research. The tab "What Type of Source?" presents an overview of the various types of information sources, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each.
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Last Updated: Sep 3, 2024 10:23 AM
URL: https://libguides.jsu.edu/litresearchpoems

Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How To Write A Poetry Research Paper

Introduction

Writing a poetry research paper can be an intimidating task for students. Even for experienced writers, the process of writing a research paper on poetry can be daunting. However, there are a few helpful tips and guidelines that can help make the process easier. Writing a research paper on poetry requires the student to have an analytical understanding of the poet or poet’s work and to utilize multiple sources of evidence in order to make a convincing argument. Before starting the research paper, it is important to properly analyze the poem and to understand the form, structure, and language of the poem.

The process of writing a research paper requires numerous steps, beginning with researching the poet and poem. If a poet is unknown, the research process must be started by learning about their biography, other works, and their impact on society. With online databases, libraries, and archives the research process can move quickly. It is important to carefully document sources for later use when creating bibliographies for the paper. Once the process of researching the poem has been completed, the next step is to analyze the poem itself. It is important for the student to read the poem carefully in order to understand the meaning, as well as its tone, imagery, and metaphors. Furthermore, analyzing other poems by the same poet can help students observe patterns, trends, or elements of a poet’s work.

Outlining and Structure

Outlining the research paper is just as important as analyzing the poem itself. Many students make the mistake of not taking enough time to craft a detailed outline that follows the structure of the paper. An effective outline will make process of writing the research paper more efficient, allowing for ease of transitions between sections of the paper. When writing the paper, it is important to think through the structure of the paper and how to make a strong argument. Support for the argument should be based on concrete evidence, such as literary criticism, literary theory, and close readings of the poem. It is essential to have a clear argument that is consistent throughout the body of the paper.

Citing Sources

When writing a research paper it is also important to cite all sources that are used. The style used for citing sources will depend on the style guide indicated by the professor or the school’s guidelines. Whether using MLA, APA, or Chicago style, it is important to adhere to the style guide indicated in order to have a complete and well-written paper.

Once the research and outlining is complete, the process of drafting a poetry research paper can begin. When constructing the first draft, it is especially useful to re-read the poem and to recall evidence that supports the argument made about the poem. Additionally, it is important to proofread and edit the first draft in order to make the argument more clear and to check for any grammar or spelling errors.

Writing a research paper on poetry does not have to be a difficult task. By taking the time to properly research, analyze, and structure the paper, the process of writing a successful poetry research paper becomes easier. Following these steps— researching the poet, understanding the poem itself, outlining the paper, citing sources, and drafting the paper— will ensure a great and thorough paper is prepared.

Using Imagery and Metaphor

The use of imagery and metaphor is an essential element when writing poetry. Imagery can be used to provide vivid descriptions of scenes and characters, while metaphor can be used to create deeper meanings and analogies. Understanding the use of imagery and metaphor can help to break down the poem and discover hidden meanings. Students researching poetry should pay special attentions to the poetic devices used to further the story or allusions to other works, such as classical mythology. Paying close attention to the language, metaphors, and imagery used by the poet can help to uncover the true meaning of the poem. By breaking down the element of the poem and focusing on individual elements, it is much easier to make valid conclusions about the poem and its author.

Understanding Rhyme and Meter

Rhyme and meter are two of the most important and complex elements of poetry. These two poetic techniques are used to help the poet structure their poem to provide rhythm and flow. Most commonly, rhyme and meter help to provide emphasis to certain words or phrases to give them additional meaning. When analyzing poetry, it is important to pay attention to the written rhyme schemes and meter of the poem. There are various patterns of rhyme, such as couplets, tercets, and quatrains. Meter, usually governed by iambs and trochees, can give the poem an added sense of rhythm to further emphasize certain words, phrases, or thoughts.

Exploring Themes

Themes are the central ideas behind a poem. The themes of a poem can be subtle and can be found in the language and images used. Exploring the poem through a thematic analysis can help to identify the true meaning of the poem and the message that the poet is conveying. When researching a poem, it is important to identify the primary theme of the poem and to look for evidence in the poem that can be used to support the claim. By paying attention to the language of a poem, students can uncover the deeper meanings within the poem and can move past the literal interpretation of the poem.

Analyzing Discourse and Context

In addition to the written aspects of a poem, it is important to consider the historical and social context of the poem. The context of the poem can be used to further understand its deeper meanings and implications. Collingwood’s theory of re-enactment can be used to reconstruct the context of a poem in order to gain a deeper understanding of the poem. When researching a poem, it is important to consider the the time period in which the poem was written, the author’s other works, and the broader literary context of the poem. Examining the discourse used by the poet can help to uncover the true message of the poem and the impact on society at the time.

Finding Inspiration

When researching poetry, it is important for the student to find inspiration in the form of other authors, critics, and theorists. Studying the works of other authors can provide valuable insight into a poem and can inform the student’s own interpretations. In addition to studying critics and theorists, the student should also look to other poets and authors as sources of inspiration. The student can explore the works of similar poets or authors to learn how they use their poetic elements in their work. This can help students to gain insight into the language, imagery, and themes present in the poem being researched.

Minnie Walters

Minnie Walters is a passionate writer and lover of poetry. She has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the work of famous poets such as William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and many more. She hopes you will also fall in love with poetry!

ENG 102 - Poetry Research

7. Write Your Paper

Write Your Paper/Project

Getting started.

Writing Fundamentals from Writer's Reference Center This has links to articles on writing any document, paraphrasing, quotations, writing a thesis statement, outline, body paragraphs, conclusion, and writing about themes, characters, form, symbols, etc.
Choosing a Research Topic and Creating a Thesis This guide from the SCC Library provides students information on how to choose a research topic for an assignment including what makes a good research topic, concept mapping, background research, and narrowing a topic and most importantly information about creating a thesis.
Choosing a Topic (Tutorial) This SCC Library tutorial will walk you through how to choose an appropriate topic for a research assignment and help you turn your research topic into a thesis statement.

How to Explicate a Poem

MLA Formatting for Papers

If you're using APA Format for your paper - see our APA Guide

Creating and Formatting MLA Paper This guide from SCC Library provides you instructions in MS Word for formatting a paper correctly including proper font and header.
Formatting Your Works Cited Page-MLA This guide from SCC Library provides you instructions in MS Word for formatting works cited page correctly including proper font and hanging in-dent.
Sample Paper in MLA Format Don't forget to format your paper in MLA format. This sample paper will show you how to format your paper.
Sample MLA Paper with Block Quote Sample MLA paper that includes how do a block quote.
MLA Guide to Undergraduate Research in Literature This helpful book will walk you through all parts of doing literary research, from how to get started doing literary research to how to find sources about literature.
Sample Drama Paper with Line Number Citations This sample drama paper will show examples of in-text citations using line numbers.
Sample Drama Paper with Dialog
Citing a Play (MLA) This SCC guide shows you how to do a works cited entry and in-text citations for plays.
Citing a Poem (MLA) This SCC guide shows you how to cite a poem on your works cited page as well as in-text.

Incorporating Sources into a Research Project & Avoiding Plagiarism

Organizing Your Research This guide from the SCC Library provides information on creating research note cards, source tables, and research outlines to help organize your sources so that you can incorporate them into your paper.
Incorporating Sources into a Research Project This guide from the SCC Library provides resources on how to properly include sources in a research project without plagiarism, whether through good note-taking, following the research process, or using direct quotations, paraphrasing, or summarizing, etc.
How to Paraphrase: Avoid Plagiarism in Research Papers with Paraphrases & Quotations (3 min. video) This video explains how to paraphrase information correctly to avoid plagiarism.
English Composition I: The Writer's Circle, Lesson 9, Part 4, Integrating Research (Video) This video talk about citing sources to avoid plagiarizing. (1 min)

Additional Resources

Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) This site contains resources for writing, research, grammar, mechanics, and style guides (MLA & APA).

The Learning Center (TLC)

Free live online tutoring and writing help, available 24/7 - TutorMe (accessed through D2L).
Visit the TLC in-person at Giles or other campuses. Visit the TLC Portal Page (SCC Log in Required) for hours and English and Computer tutor availability.
Email your paper/project to them at [email protected] . They offer a 48 hour turn-around on papers (excluding weekends and holidays), and ask that you send a copy of the assignment as well. The paper needs to be Microsoft Word format (don't share a copy of your OneDrive/cloud account), and please include your due date and SCC college ID number in the email.

Visit the The Learning Center located in the P. Dan Hull Building, rooms E2, E5, E6. See TLC Portal Page (SCC log in required) for additional locations. Contact The Learning Center for more information .

<< Previous: 6. Evaluate Your Sources
Next: Literary Criticism Guide >>
1. Getting Started
2. Explore Your Topic
3. Narrow Your Topic
4. Find Sources
5. Cite Your Sources
6. Evaluate Your Sources
Literary Criticism Guide

Questions? Ask a Librarian

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Last Updated: Sep 5, 2024 11:18 AM
URL: https://libguides.sccsc.edu/Poetry

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Poems and Poets

Finding Poems
Finding Poets (Biography)
Reference Sources
Literary Criticism
Publishing, Bibliographies and Anthologies
Special Collections and Archives
MLA Style and Citation Management Tools

Ask a Librarian via email , text us at +1-646-265-1342, or schedule an appointment .

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Search the NYU Libraries Resources

Search for books, journals, videos, etc. in our local libraries and special collections.

Search other catalogs

Poetry Daily

Poetry Daily offers a new poem by a contemporary poet every day, selected from books, magazines, and journals.

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry contains 250,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations, numbers that will continually expand with each update. The poems in full text are the most widely-read in the English language, as well as in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Included also is poetry in Portuguese, Polish, Yiddish, Welsh, Gaelic, and other Celtic languages, as well as poems in the ancient languages: Anglo-Saxon, Provencal and Latin. Scholars in each of these languages have reviewed and guided the selection of poems, so that the poetry on Granger’s is also the poetry encountered in the classroom.

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry offers complete coverage of the works of several individual great poets, including the complete poems of Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and other major poets. In addition, users will find a wealth of current poetry from some of the best poetry periodicals, such as Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new window

Searching the catalog

You can search the NYU Libraries' catalog by title, author, or subject to find books of poetry in the library. Use the limiters in the third drop-down menu from the main search screen to make your selections. Here are some examples:

What are Years
Meditations in an Emergency
Paradise Lost
Millay, Edna St. Vincent
Bishop, Elizabeth
Keats, John
Lyric Poetry
Poets, American
Poetry, Modern
Poets, Chinese - Biography

Digital Collections of Poetry (NYU access)

African American Poetry This link opens in a new window A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring thousands of poems by some of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
Alexander Street Literature This link opens in a new window Alexander Street Literature is a cross-searchable package of full-text literature collections, focused on place, race, and gender. The collections include poetry, short fiction, novels, full-text plays, and film scripts.
Emily Dickinson Archive This link opens in a new window The Emily Dickinson Archive provides high-resolution images of manuscripts of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from selected historical and scholarly editions.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period includes searchable full text and page images for volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842. The collection also offers numerous biographical and critical essays prepared by leading scholars
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window Latino Literature is a searchable collection of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino writers working in the United States, including previously unpublished titles. The database also includes a collection of ephemera (playbills, brochures, photographs, postcards, etc.) and artwork.
Literary Manuscripts Leeds This link opens in a new window Literary Manuscripts Leeds contains complete facsimile images of manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with a database of first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and color images demonstrating 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author. More information less... A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape provides access to digitized images of manuscripts, artworks, and correspondence from the Wordsworth Trust, focusing on William Wordsworth and his circle. This collection also includes the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth and manuscripts from Romantic writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period contains searchable full text of Romantic-era poetry composed by Scottish women, as well as contemporary critical reviews and numerous scholarly essays on the poets and their work.

Other Online Resources for Poetry

The following sites are available through the open web. Some of these sites may have digitized images of the original texts along with extensive bibliographies. But, when searching the internet for research purposes, be sure to pay close attention to sites with .org or .edu web addresses. If you find a valuable site not listed below, please let me know so that I can add it to the list.

American Verse Project (University of Michigan) The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.
The Edmund Spenser Homepage (Cambridge University) The Edmund Spenser Home Page is the home of Edmund Spenser studies on the Internet. This set of pages is devoted to supporting the reading, study, and dicussion of the words of Edmund Spenser. It aims to serve the needs of the scholar, of the student, and of the interested passer-by, offering resources and links of various level of specialization
Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a peer-reviewed digital archive and research project devoted to the poetry of the long eighteenth century. It includes searchable full text of over 3,000 poems, building on the electronic texts created by the Text Creation Partnership from Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Favorite Poem Project The Favorite Poem Project is dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives. Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems. This site archives videos of participants in the project reciting the poems they chose.
For Better for Verse (University of Virginia) For Better for Verse is an interactive learning tool that can help you understand what makes metered poetry in English tick.
Free Verse An online journal that publishes contemporary poetry, interviews with poets, and book reviews. Hosted by North Carolina State University.
Milton - L (University of Richmond) Devoted to the life, literature and times of John Milton. Contains electronic versions of Milton's work and other reference material.
Modern American Poetry (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) A "scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry," which includes: biographies, critical essays, and images relating to poetry.
PennSound A project from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, PennSound provides sound files of contemporary poets reading their work. Search or browse for individual poems, or listen to entire poetry readings. You can listen to the MP3 files online or download them to listen to on your MP3 player.
The Poetry Archive The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.
Representative Poetry Online (University of Toronto) Representative Poetry Online, includes 4,079 English poems by 618 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today.
Rossetti Archive The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.
Victorian Women Writers Project (Indiana University) The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
Walt Whitman Archive (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Includes digitized versions of all six editions of Leaves of Grass, plus a growing collection of Whitman's manuscripts.
The William Blake Archive The Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees.
The Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

This is a great resource for locating poems, researching poets, and exploring the numerous features including podcasts and videos of poets and their poetry.

Launched in 1996, Poets.org is the award-winning website of the Academy of American Poets. Visitors to Poets.org will find thousands of poems as well as hundreds of poet biographies and essays and interviews about poetry . Also available are poetry lesson plans for teachers. Poets.org receives a million visitors each month, making it the most popular site about poetry on the web.

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Last Updated: Sep 12, 2024 1:45 AM
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Trending Post : 12 Powerful Discussion Strategies to Engage Students

Poetry Activities: Six Simple Ways to Make Poetry Instruction Engaging

So you have to teach poetry, and it’s not your favorite. Or maybe you love it, but your students just don’t share that same passion. In either scenario, you’re in good company. For some reason, poetry is just one of those things that people tend to love or hate . There’s not much middle ground. Don’t worry. There’s hope! Fun poetry activities can bring units to life.

I used to dread poetry. Everything I can remember about poetry from high school was so boring. Over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate it…probably because as an English teacher, I’ve had to study it more intensely and find ways to make it applicable and relevant to students. I’m not that great at feigning interest, so I’ve had to get creative with my poetry instruction in order to find ways that I can truly be excited about teaching it.

Whether it’s National Poetry Month or just a part of your regular curriculum, hopefully these ideas will give you some inspiration and direction if you’re just not excited about the prospect of spending some of your precious classroom instruction on verse. These approaches have worked in my classroom in terms of engaging students with reading, analyzing, and writing about poetry and related skills.

Entice them with music.

No matter what grade I’m teaching, I always begin my poetry units with music for obvious reasons: students love it, music is poetry, it sets a positive atmosphere, it’s relevant. Any school-appropriate song can be studied as poetry.

I usually select a piece after determining my goal. For example, students can use poetry to analyze the author’s voice, to study grammar rules, to determine vocabulary from context clues, to read through a critical lens, or to study rhythm and rhyme.

Beginning by determining the learning goal naturally narrows down the music selection. Analyzing music as poetry can be a powerful and memorable learning experience. You can access my free analyzing poetry assignment here .

Write poems that are fun and nonthreatening.

When students who dislike poetry are asked to write a sonnet or a villanelle, they are often scared away before even putting their pencil to paper. It’s a lot to ask a student who feels they can’t relate to a genre to understand it well enough to write an example.

While standards do require that students read complex texts and write for a wide variety of purposes, they don’t specifically state that students must demonstrate the ability to write a complex poem. If your students happen to enjoy that type of assignment, you’re blessed! For the rest of us, why not make poetry less stress?

Incorporate choice…

We can offer choice assignments. In the past, after studying various types of poems, I’ve let my students choose what type of poem they want to write.

Fun and nontraditional poems can inspire students to produce original pieces beyond our imaginations. Concrete poems, creative nonfiction , nonsense poems, bio poems, six-room poems, blackout poetry, and acrostics are just a handful of examples that prove allowing a different style of creativity to creep into poetry instruction can revolutionize the entire unit.

Put students in charge…

If you’re not a non-traditional poem expert, don’t let that scare you away! Make it a research assignment where students study the type of poem they want to write, become the masters, and teach the class about those styles.

In reflecting about allowing choice as it relates to writing poems, I’m reminded of a time one of my students surprised me with his work during a multigenre research project . He wrote twenty limericks, and he connected all of them into one larger poem about the relationships between cats and dogs. That was impressive. Never in my wildest dreams would I have asked students to write twenty connected limericks, but because I had given students the freedom to express their imaginative side through their own means, I was truly rewarded with some amazing work.

Focus on reading comprehension.

Sometimes students just need to know that we aren’t going to ask them to read a poem, discuss it, write about it, complete a project on it, and then memorize it. It’s possible that once in a while, we kill a poem by coming at it from too many angles, and it’s overwhelming for students.

I’ve had success with making poetry less stressful when I only ask students to complete one task, like read it and comprehend it. The comprehension part might come through class discussion, through writing, or both. I like using simple comprehension journal topics when I ask students to respond to poetry because it helps them to process their thoughts before or after sharing with the class.

Use picture books.

Children’s picture books are gold mines for poetry, even at the secondary level. Many have elements of verse we can analyze, like rhyme scheme, sound devices, structure, and voice. Read a book to the entire class and discuss it, or pass out different books to small groups and have them analyze an aspect of the poetry.

I’ve used Skippyjon Jones to teach assonance and alliteration in the past, and students can’t get enough of it. Dr. Seuss books are another excellent resource. The Pout-Pout Fish is one of my favorites. An alternate way you can use picture books to teach poetry is to use a wordless book, like Flotsam, and have students write a stanza of poetry to accompany each page.

Use poetry to teach a writing skill .

Heading into a poetry unit, sometimes I’m thinking, How am I going to get through this unit so we have enough time to work on our research papers? It’s true that ELA teachers have a lot on their plates. Reading, writing, grammar, poetry, vocabulary… the list goes on. Teaching English works best for me when I blend the concepts taught in each unit.

When we study poetry, for instance, I might ask the students to focus specifically on analyzing the concept of diction . We can talk about how each of the words the poet selected carries power. Through figurative language, denotation, connotation, symbolism, imagery, and more, authors paint pictures with their words. When I transition into my writing unit, my students are already familiar with the importance of word choice as it relates to message and voice.

Play games.

I’m all about the games in my classroom. They allow students to practice skills in a way that fosters laughter and learning simultaneously. With poetry, the opportunities for games are numerous, especially if you focus specifically on types of poetry or figurative language.

My two favorite figurative language games are Truth or Dare and Get Schooled! My kids enjoy these activities, and (perhaps even more important) I get a stitch out of watching them review the terms, learning from one another as they discuss definitions and examples with a unique approach. This poetry challenge is fun to use with a variety of poems.

With a little bit of ingenuity, poetry units can be the highlight of your school year, even if it’s not your favorite part of teaching ELA. Hopefully these simple takeaways have inspired you to try something new with your next poetry unit. If you have successful poetry activities or lessons to share, we’d love to hear about them. Please drop your success stories in the comments. Let’s learn together!

13 Ways Pictures Inspire Students to Write Poetry

Writing nonfiction inspired poetry, paired text analysis: short films and poetry.

Some lovely ideas here for taking the fear out of poetry that students often feel. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you so much! Yes, so many students dislike poetry. I’ve had to get creative with my approaches. Using these techniques also makes teaching poetry more enjoyable and manageable for me (it’s not my favorite, either). 🙂

Some lovely ideas for taking the fear out of poetry that students often feel. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for offering this. It’s encouraging.

You’re welcome, Ivory! I’m happy to share my ideas, and I hope they help you.

Comments are closed.

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11 Fun Poetry Activities Middle School Students Will Love

Did you know April is National Poetry Month? I’m so excited for it. I love, love, love poetry, and I want your middle schoolers to love it too! Writing poetry got me through some tough times as an angsty middle schooler and teen, so I always look forward to exploring poetry with my students. I hope some of these poetry activities for middle school will help you get excited about teaching poetry to your students too!

Outdoor Poetry Activities for Middle School

Learning is always more fun in the sun! Here’s a super simple outdoor writing activity you can use with your class on the next sunny day. Take students outside and challenge them to pick one thing that they think is beautiful (and yes, it should be a thing, not a person…). Get them to describe that item with the most vivid language possible. You could also challenge them to use only figurative language. Later, have them to pick their favourite phrases and build a poem around them.

If you’re teaching students how to write haikus, there’s no better place to be than in the great outdoors! Traditionally, haikus are written about nature, which makes this lesson the perfect opportunity for outdoor learning. I have this vision of finding a cherry blossom tree near my school and getting my students to sit around it as they write some haikus…

Half the fun of writing poetry is getting to share it. Have your students make a poetry walk on the school grounds with sidewalk chalk. Give them all a section of the sidewalk and let them write one of their favourite poems! For this activity, shorter poems like couplets and haikus are generally better. They’re easier for people passing by to read, and they’re easy to write with fat pieces of chalk.

Teaching Rhyme or Structure

Games for teaching rhyme.

Rhyme Challenges are one of the easiest poetry activities middle school teachers can use to help students practice rhyme. Put a one-syllable word up on the board, break students into groups, and challenge them to come up with as many rhyming words as possible. Then, as a class, take some time to share all the words students brainstormed. To make this into a competition, coordinate with another teacher so your classes can compete

One thing to note: many students will find that coming up with multisyllabic rhymes are difficult. If you want to incentivise them to think out of the box, tell them each syllable is worth one point! These challenges are a great opportunity to model how you come up with rhymes. Personally, I do a mental run-through of the alphabet. For example, if I’m rhyming with “cat”, I’d think bat, chat, drat, fat, etc.

Around the World is another one of those fun poetry activities middle school students will love. Begin by having all but one of the students sit in their seats. That one student stands behind a classmate. This is the starting point. On the count of three, the teacher calls out a word. The student who is standing and the student sitting in front of them both try to think of a word that rhymes. Whoever comes up with one first gets to move on and stand behind the next student. The person who loses this round sits in the seat, whether that means they stay where they were seated or trade places with the person they were standing behind. The challenge is to see if any students can make it ‘around the world’ (around the classroom and back to the seat they started in).

Buzz In: A Game for Poetic Structure

If you’re teaching a poetic structure with rules, like limericks or haikus, here’s a fun way to practice them. I call it Buzz In, but it’s really just gamified collective writing. Start off by picking a particular poetic form. For this example, let’s go with limericks. Choose three or four students to come up to the front and give each one buzzers or some way to signal when they’re ready.

Tell students the first line of the poem they’ll be “playing”. For this example, let’s start with – “There once was a girl whose name was Ann.”

The first student to buzz in and share a second line gets to stay in the game. Perhaps they say something like, “who played in an angry rock band.” The students who did not buzz in first return to their desks.

Call three more students up. Recite the two lines of the poem as it currently stands.
Whoever buzzes in first with the next line gets to stay. The others return to their desks.
Continue until the poem is complete.
See if students can break the class record for staying in the game for the most rounds!

Analyzing Poetry Activities

Poetry puzzles.

The first student to buzz in and share a second line gets to stay in the game. Perhaps they say something like, “who played in an angry rock band”. The other three return to their desks.
Call three more students up. Recite the two lines that you have now (yours and the one from the student who won the last round).
Whoever buzzes in first with the next line gets to stay, and the others return to their desks.

Cross-Curricular Poetry Analysis

If you teach multiple subjects, consider tying poetry into a math unit on patterns . Patterning and rhyme schemes go hand in hand! You can even tie in math, poetry, and art, by having students represent the rhyme scheme of a poem in a visual arts piece.

Another way you can make your poetry unit cross-curricular is by having students represent a poem through dance, drama, visual arts, or music . Students could come up with a short skit that showcases an event they think may have inspired their chosen poem. They could also create an illustrated poetry anthology. I have criteria and rubrics available for a poetry anthology project here .

If you’re looking for guaranteed buy-in for your middle school poetry unit, bring in some music by sending students on a Music Hunt ! Get them to look for songs that have examples of specific literary devices or follow a particular rhyme scheme. Let them play the song for their classmates (as long as it’s school-appropriate, of course), and demonstrate how it fits the criteria.

Poetry Books for Middle School

I ntroduce your students to the world of free verse poetry! It’ll blow the minds of kids who were raised to think Cat in the Hat was the height of poetic sophistication. Here are some free verse poetry books middle school students will love:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai
Forget Me Not by Ellie Terry
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
Anything by Kwame Alexander
Here Was Paradise by Humberto A’kabal

Looking for something shorter? Try out Can I Touch You r Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship . It’s a picture book written from the perspectives of a white girl and Black boy who are paired together for a poetry project… what a great anchor text for a poetry unit!

Just because you’re teaching big kids, it doesn’t mean that you have to ditch your rhyming picture books! Older kids enjoy a just-for-fun read aloud too. You can totally use simple poetry books for middle school lessons. Make your students work a little by pausing as you read and getting them to shout out their rhyme predictions. Some of my favourite go-to books for rhyme predicting are Thelma the Unicorn , The Girl Who Thought in Pictures , and The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes . If you want to be extra tricky, you can cover the rhyming words with sticky notes.

Poetry Activities as Morning Work

If you’re into morning work, try some of these poetry warm up activities!

Free verse can be daunting for young writers who are used to thinking of poetry as words that rhyme. It’s almost like they’re intimidated by the lack of structure! Attempting it in small, manageable chunks with familiar topics makes it much less scary. For example, you might have students write a free verse poem about their happy place as a morning work activity.
Finish This: Begin by putting part of a poem on the board; it can be one you made up or something you found online or in a book. Challenge students to come up with the rest of the poem, then take some time to let volunteers share their completed poems with the class. It’s so neat to see all the different ways students run with the same text!

Poetry Teaching Activities: Gallery Walk or Pass-Along

Middle school students are old enough to stretch themselves when it comes to poetry. We can start expecting them to move away from basic rhymes. And, for the love of all things literary, we can ditch those horrid “I Am” poems. Any poem that works as a fill-in-the-blank is not going to stretch your students as writers.

If we want students to write quality poetry that doesn’t sound like they used a template, we need to actually expose them to high-quality poetry. We need them to know that poetry can take many different forms. Here’s the thing, even the best poets in the world are not going to excel in every poetic form… and that’s OK. When teaching poetry, I think it’s important to let students experiment with a bunch of different poetic forms so they can find what makes their hearts sing.

If we want students to write poetry that doesn't sound like they used a template, we need to actually expose them to high-quality poetry.

This is where one of my favourite poetry teaching activities comes in: poetry gallery walks ! This set of poetry gallery walk posters features example poems for nine different poetic forms. Before I introduce a new poetic form, students can go on a poetry gallery walk to explore some examples. I always like to see if they can figure out the ‘rules’ of the poetic form as they go.

Students move at their own pace and don’t have to read all the examples, but they should read at least a few. Afterward, we debrief by talking about what the poems had in common and what made them different. We share favourite lines and see if anyone has questions or comments they’d like to share about the meanings of or words in the poems. I like this structure because it makes the students do the work of figuring things out on their own rather than just listening to me tell them the ‘rules’.

If space is limited in your room, see if you can use space in the hallways or outside for your gallery walks! I often do mine outdoors; our portable is magnetic, so I just stick the posters in whiteboard pockets and hang them up with magnetic whiteboard clips. However, if space isn’t available, you can also do a poetry pass-along with these little poetry cards (see below)!

Text reads: Poetry gallery walk or pass-around. Pictures of a poetry poster and a little poetry card are on either side.

Looking for more poetry teaching ideas for middle school or upper-elementary?

If so, check out this blog post that outlines how to structure a middle school poetry unit!

Teaching poetry in upper elementary and middle school. Features pictures of poetry sample cards, a slideshow with a poem to analyse, and a page from a middle-schooler's poetry book.

Want to remember these poetry activities middle school students will love? Pin the imge below to save them for later!

11 poetry activities middle school students will love

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Poetry Draft Assignment

Introduction.

For this assignment, students will examine drafts of poems from the Rose Library’s poetry collections, looking for insights offered by an author’s changes between drafts and the published poem. After examining the drafts, students will write an argument-driven, formal essay analyzing the poem and the author’s choice and are encouraged, but not required, to use secondary sources. Students may need to return to the Reading Room for this assignment, but should be allowed to do so at their discretion.

This assignment serves as an introduction to archival research and an introduction to a type of scholarship in the field of literary studies.

After completing this assignment, students will be able to

conduct archival research
read library catalogue and finding aid information
practice appropriate care and handling of archival materials
develop an analytical argument based on primary source research
use close reading skills and critical thinking to analyze a poem

In order to make the most of your time during your Rose Library Session, please be sure to prepare your students in advance.

Instructor should provide a clear goal of what students should accomplish during rotations
Prior to the session, students should understand what they are looking for while examining the materials
Students should have a clear sense of what they need to know about an object to complete the assignment successfully
We recommend using digitized or photocopied materials in class to help students understand how to read drafts

Here’s what you can expect during your class session:

Introduction to the Rose Library (if this is the first class visit)
Introduction to the materials in use
Care and handling instructions
A modified version of speed dating , in which students will select 5 drafts to examine and rotate among those items. Students may work in pairs or small groups when necessary.

Students will produce a 5-6 page thesis driven essay.

Relevant collections will vary with course topics. Please consult with Rose Library staff to determine how our materials can best serve your course goals. Below are collections frequently used with assignments of this nature.

Seamus Heaney papers and collection
Michael Longley papers
Ciaran Carson papers
Paul Muldoon papers
Ted Hughes papers
Carol Ann Duffy papers
Medbh McGuckian papers
Nuala Ni Dhomnaill (translations and cribs in Gallery Press papers , McGuckian papers )
Lucille Clifton papers

The time students spend with materials in the session will be most productive if they have read the poems before coming to the library. Students also may want to have a copy of the published versions of the poems with them while examining drafts.

To cite this page:

Suhr-Sytsma, Nathan. "Poetry Draft Assignment," Rose Library Teaching with Archives Portal, [date of access], http://rose.library.emory.edu/instruction/portal/assignments/poetry-draft.html .

Please cite this portal and give credit to the creator when using this assignment.

Dr Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Emory

Used In ENG 205 Introduction to Poetry

This writing-intensive class serves as an introduction to the English major and helps students build skills for understanding, analyzing, and enjoying poetry.

Adaptability This assignment can be adapted for use in any class that studies poetry. It can be altered to be a more intensive project for upper-level students, or it can be made into a lower-stakes assignment, such as a blog post.

Highlighted Materials Seamus Heaney papers (MSS 960) and collection (MSS 653) Michael Longley papers (MSS 744) Carol Ann Duffy papers (MSS 834) Lucille Clifton papers (MSS 1054)

Course Materials Printable Assignment Sheet

A Full Guide to Writing a Perfect Poem Analysis Essay

01 October, 2020

14 minutes read

Author: Elizabeth Brown

Poem analysis is one of the most complicated essay types. It requires the utmost creativity and dedication. Even those who regularly attend a literary class and have enough experience in poem analysis essay elaboration may face considerable difficulties while dealing with the particular poem. The given article aims to provide the detailed guidelines on how to write a poem analysis, elucidate the main principles of writing the essay of the given type, and share with you the handy tips that will help you get the highest score for your poetry analysis. In addition to developing analysis skills, you would be able to take advantage of the poetry analysis essay example to base your poetry analysis essay on, as well as learn how to find a way out in case you have no motivation and your creative assignment must be presented on time.

What Is a Poetry Analysis Essay?

A poetry analysis essay is a type of creative write-up that implies reviewing a poem from different perspectives by dealing with its structural, artistic, and functional pieces. Since the poetry expresses very complicated feelings that may have different meanings depending on the backgrounds of both author and reader, it would not be enough just to focus on the text of the poem you are going to analyze. Poetry has a lot more complex structure and cannot be considered without its special rhythm, images, as well as implied and obvious sense.

While analyzing the poem, the students need to do in-depth research as to its content, taking into account the effect the poetry has or may have on the readers.

Preparing for the Poetry Analysis Writing

The process of preparation for the poem analysis essay writing is almost as important as writing itself. Without completing these stages, you may be at risk of failing your creative assignment. Learn them carefully to remember once and for good.

Thoroughly read the poem several times

The rereading of the poem assigned for analysis will help to catch its concepts and ideas. You will have a possibility to define the rhythm of the poem, its type, and list the techniques applied by the author.

While identifying the type of the poem, you need to define whether you are dealing with:

Lyric poem – the one that elucidates feelings, experiences, and the emotional state of the author. It is usually short and doesn’t contain any narration;
Limerick – consists of 5 lines, the first, second, and fifth of which rhyme with one another;
Sonnet – a poem consisting of 14 lines characterized by an iambic pentameter. William Shakespeare wrote sonnets which have made him famous;
Ode – 10-line poem aimed at praising someone or something;
Haiku – a short 3-line poem originated from Japan. It reflects the deep sense hidden behind the ordinary phenomena and events of the physical world;
Free-verse – poetry with no rhyme.

The type of the poem usually affects its structure and content, so it is important to be aware of all the recognized kinds to set a proper beginning to your poetry analysis.

Find out more about the poem background

Find as much information as possible about the author of the poem, the cultural background of the period it was written in, preludes to its creation, etc. All these data will help you get a better understanding of the poem’s sense and explain much to you in terms of the concepts the poem contains.

Define a subject matter of the poem

This is one of the most challenging tasks since as a rule, the subject matter of the poem isn’t clearly stated by the poets. They don’t want the readers to know immediately what their piece of writing is about and suggest everyone find something different between the lines.

What is the subject matter? In a nutshell, it is the main idea of the poem. Usually, a poem may have a couple of subjects, that is why it is important to list each of them.

In order to correctly identify the goals of a definite poem, you would need to dive into the in-depth research.

Check the historical background of the poetry. The author might have been inspired to write a poem based on some events that occurred in those times or people he met. The lines you analyze may be generated by his reaction to some epoch events. All this information can be easily found online.

Choose poem theories you will support

In the variety of ideas the poem may convey, it is important to stick to only several most important messages you think the author wanted to share with the readers. Each of the listed ideas must be supported by the corresponding evidence as proof of your opinion.

The poetry analysis essay format allows elaborating on several theses that have the most value and weight. Try to build your writing not only on the pure facts that are obvious from the context but also your emotions and feelings the analyzed lines provoke in you.

How to Choose a Poem to Analyze?

If you are free to choose the piece of writing you will base your poem analysis essay on, it is better to select the one you are already familiar with. This may be your favorite poem or one that you have read and analyzed before. In case you face difficulties choosing the subject area of a particular poem, then the best way will be to focus on the idea you feel most confident about. In such a way, you would be able to elaborate on the topic and describe it more precisely.

Now, when you are familiar with the notion of the poetry analysis essay, it’s high time to proceed to poem analysis essay outline. Follow the steps mentioned below to ensure a brilliant structure to your creative assignment.

Best Poem Analysis Essay Topics

Mother To Son Poem Analysis
We Real Cool Poem Analysis
Invictus Poem Analysis
Richard Cory Poem Analysis
Ozymandias Poem Analysis
Barbie Doll Poem Analysis
Caged Bird Poem Analysis
Ulysses Poem Analysis
Dover Beach Poem Analysis
Annabelle Lee Poem Analysis
Daddy Poem Analysis
The Raven Poem Analysis
The Second Coming Poem Analysis
Still I Rise Poem Analysis
If Poem Analysis
Fire And Ice Poem Analysis
My Papa’S Waltz Poem Analysis
Harlem Poem Analysis
Kubla Khan Poem Analysis
I Too Poem Analysis
The Juggler Poem Analysis
The Fish Poem Analysis
Jabberwocky Poem Analysis
Charge Of The Light Brigade Poem Analysis
The Road Not Taken Poem Analysis
Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus Poem Analysis
The History Teacher Poem Analysis
One Art Poem Analysis
The Wanderer Poem Analysis
We Wear The Mask Poem Analysis
There Will Come Soft Rains Poem Analysis
Digging Poem Analysis
The Highwayman Poem Analysis
The Tyger Poem Analysis
London Poem Analysis
Sympathy Poem Analysis
I Am Joaquin Poem Analysis
This Is Just To Say Poem Analysis
Sex Without Love Poem Analysis
Strange Fruit Poem Analysis
Dulce Et Decorum Est Poem Analysis
Emily Dickinson Poem Analysis
The Flea Poem Analysis
The Lamb Poem Analysis
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Poem Analysis
My Last Duchess Poetry Analysis

Poem Analysis Essay Outline

As has already been stated, a poetry analysis essay is considered one of the most challenging tasks for the students. Despite the difficulties you may face while dealing with it, the structure of the given type of essay is quite simple. It consists of the introduction, body paragraphs, and the conclusion. In order to get a better understanding of the poem analysis essay structure, check the brief guidelines below.

Introduction

This will be the first section of your essay. The main purpose of the introductory paragraph is to give a reader an idea of what the essay is about and what theses it conveys. The introduction should start with the title of the essay and end with the thesis statement.

The main goal of the introduction is to make readers feel intrigued about the whole concept of the essay and serve as a hook to grab their attention. Include some interesting information about the author, the historical background of the poem, some poem trivia, etc. There is no need to make the introduction too extensive. On the contrary, it should be brief and logical.

Body Paragraphs

The body section should form the main part of poetry analysis. Make sure you have determined a clear focus for your analysis and are ready to elaborate on the main message and meaning of the poem. Mention the tone of the poetry, its speaker, try to describe the recipient of the poem’s idea. Don’t forget to identify the poetic devices and language the author uses to reach the main goals. Describe the imagery and symbolism of the poem, its sound and rhythm.

Try not to stick to too many ideas in your body section, since it may make your essay difficult to understand and too chaotic to perceive. Generalization, however, is also not welcomed. Try to be specific in the description of your perspective.

Make sure the transitions between your paragraphs are smooth and logical to make your essay flow coherent and easy to catch.

In a nutshell, the essay conclusion is a paraphrased thesis statement. Mention it again but in different words to remind the readers of the main purpose of your essay. Sum up the key claims and stress the most important information. The conclusion cannot contain any new ideas and should be used to create a strong impact on the reader. This is your last chance to share your opinion with the audience and convince them your essay is worth readers’ attention.

Problems with writing Your Poem Analysis Essay? Try our Essay Writer Service!

Poem Analysis Essay Examples

A good poem analysis essay example may serve as a real magic wand to your creative assignment. You may take a look at the structure the other essay authors have used, follow their tone, and get a great share of inspiration and motivation.

Check several poetry analysis essay examples that may be of great assistance:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/poetry-analysis-essay-example-for-english-literature.html
https://www.slideshare.net/mariefincher/poetry-analysis-essay

Writing Tips for a Poetry Analysis Essay

If you read carefully all the instructions on how to write a poetry analysis essay provided above, you have probably realized that this is not the easiest assignment on Earth. However, you cannot fail and should try your best to present a brilliant essay to get the highest score. To make your life even easier, check these handy tips on how to analysis poetry with a few little steps.

In case you have a chance to choose a poem for analysis by yourself, try to focus on one you are familiar with, you are interested in, or your favorite one. The writing process will be smooth and easy in case you are working on the task you truly enjoy.
Before you proceed to the analysis itself, read the poem out loud to your colleague or just to yourself. It will help you find out some hidden details and senses that may result in new ideas.
Always check the meaning of words you don’t know. Poetry is quite a tricky phenomenon where a single word or phrase can completely change the meaning of the whole piece.
Bother to double check if the conclusion of your essay is based on a single idea and is logically linked to the main body. Such an approach will demonstrate your certain focus and clearly elucidate your views.
Read between the lines. Poetry is about senses and emotions – it rarely contains one clearly stated subject matter. Describe the hidden meanings and mention the feelings this has provoked in you. Try to elaborate a full picture that would be based on what is said and what is meant.

Write a Poetry Analysis Essay with HandmadeWriting

You may have hundreds of reasons why you can’t write a brilliant poem analysis essay. In addition to the fact that it is one of the most complicated creative assignments, you can have some personal issues. It can be anything from lots of homework, a part-time job, personal problems, lack of time, or just the absence of motivation. In any case, your main task is not to let all these factors influence your reputation and grades. A perfect way out may be asking the real pros of essay writing for professional help.

There are a lot of benefits why you should refer to the professional writing agencies in case you are not in the mood for elaborating your poetry analysis essay. We will only state the most important ones:

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Formatting will be done professionally and without any effort from your side. No need to waste your time on such a boring activity.

As you see, there are a lot of advantages to ordering your poetry analysis essay from HandmadeWriting . Having such a perfect essay example now will contribute to your inspiration and professional growth in future.

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Some teachers have found it helpful to introduce poets and poems for beginning and mid to advanced level students to imitate. This gives them the opportunity to read and discuss a poem, while at the same time generating their own poems. Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Unexpected Meeting” is a good example:

We are very polite to each other,

insist it’s nice meeting after all these years.

Our tigers drink milk.

Our hawks walk on the ground.

Our sharks drown in water.

Our wolves yawn in front of the open cage.

Our serpents have shaken off lightning,

monkeys---inspiration, peacocks---feathers.

The bats---long ago now---have flown out of our hair.

We fall silent in mid-phrase,

smiling beyond salvation.

have nothing to say.

Szymborska is famous for writing about particular objects and creatures that are neglected. Her work also tries to incorporate neglected feelings, and she is skeptical and ironic. J.D. McClatchy characterized the tone of her poetry as “detached sympathy.” Try to write a poem based on a very particular event, such as Szymborska’s poem about a reunion with friends. There is little that is particular about such a reunion, but the comical moment of “smiling beyond salvation,” and the idea that creatures are more articulate than humans, is very particular.

It is likely that Szymborska does not go around having these idiosyncratic thoughts all day, but in her poetry, she pays special attention to those thoughts that are nearly forgotten, or dismissed as trivial. Consider some thought or idea that you would ordinarily dismiss as random or trivial, and write a poem around it. Try to use the random or trivial thought to make a statement about life, human relations, or some other big topic.

The Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto is known for assimilating the style of pop song lyrics into his poems. He writes his own lyrics in a very abstract language. A good example is his poem “End of the World”:

At the end of the melancholy world

men read the newspapers.

Indifferent men eating oranges

that flame like the sun.

They gave me an apple to remind me

of death. I know that cities telegraph

asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying

fell in the desert.

No one will write the final poem

about this private twelve o’clock world.

Instead of the last judgment, what worries me

is the final dream.

Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, unlike Wislawa Szymborska, doesn’t try to say anything about life or the world. He tries to bring poetry closer to what he considers its original form as song, and he thinks of his words as the material of song. Often in pop songs, the words are elliptical and don’t make much sense, but they resonate in a mysterious way. Write a poem that doesn’t make any logical sense or doesn’t add up to a final meaning; think about the way lyrics in pop songs suggest meaning without directly stating it or trying to explain it.

Poems & Poets

The Start: Writing Your Own Poem

Resisting the urge to interpret contemporary poems and “wrong” dreams..

BY Judy Rowe Michaels

Practice of an art is more salutary than talk about it. There is nothing more composing than composition. —Robert Frost, from his notebooks in Poetry and Prose (Holt, 1972)

Leaving a Loop Two thousand miles from home, I open a drawer and—I’d have sworn it was mine, the weaving lumpy, my fingers still all thumbs but they loved the peaceful push pull, pushpull so much that one summer on the boathouse porch with the tree growing right up through the floor I made thirty-two pot holders on the square-jawed metal loom, stretching colors soft as old rags soft as this pale buttercup this faded-eye blue, and the green fresh as light on maple wings, seedlight. I wasn’t making gifts, it was the rhythm of the thing and the small loom, square and safe, like the four lines of a child’s house. I was homesick, this was spiderwork, nestwork, easy till you reached the part where you unhooked your web from the frame. Here, see the braided corners, on the last one somehow you pulled the right thing through to leave a loop for hanging. I didn’t know I was making gifts but last winter when my mother died she still had two, there were stains and a burn mark, I never thought of someone’s hand feeling heat through the weave.

Here is a poem neither your students nor mine have ever seen before. I wrote it last night, so it’s about as contemporary as you can get, short of sitting down right now and writing your own. To me it’s a living, breathing organism—not set in stone; tomorrow I could change it. An organism made of words, that each reader will bring to life in her own way. Emily Dickinson says, “A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” (1)

Whatever my poem means to me, I couldn’t possibly reduce this meaning to a prose paragraph. I don’t want to say, “It’s about making pot holders when I was young and homesick at summer camp,” or “It’s really about my loss of my mother,” or “Actually, it’s about applied art versus fine art.” Or “It’s about the nature of home and separation.” I didn’t set out, at least consciously, to make a poem about any of this; I wanted to find out why seeing the pot holder when I opened a drawer gave me a sudden, inexplicable urge to write. Now that the poem’s written, and I’ve discovered some answers, I suppose I can say it’s all about these things.

But I’m much more interested in asking, “What does it say to you?”—you who are reading it, remember, as if your life depended on it, letting in your beliefs, your dreamlife, your physical sensations—and, I’d add to Adrienne Rich’s list, your memories and the mood you happen to be in just now . . . ?

We don’t have to start off with a discussion of what poetry is, or with a list of figures of speech, or an argument about whether this is a great poem or a lesser poem. I offer it, you take it or leave it. One thing I try to remember to tell students when the first poem of the year surfaces is that they’ll like some poems better than others, regardless of alleged “greatness.” I tell them I’m really eager to see which poems each person chooses to talk about during the year ahead—or chooses to read aloud, copy into a notebook, go find more poems by the author of, write a poem back to, or steal words from.

These are all fine responses to a poem, just as good as writing a three-page critical analysis of it. Of course, many college professors won’t feel this way, but carpe diem. Right now it’s high school. Or junior high. And surely there is life after college—some sixty years of it.

There are certain advantages to starting off with a contemporary poem. Fewer footnotes, most likely, which means fewer opportunities for us to display our expertise: “In Shakespeare’s day the word ‘die’ also referred to the moment of sexual consummation. So that’s a pun right there. And there’s an allusion—an indirect reference to religiomythicopastoralhistorical.”

Fewer preliminaries, too. Before I hand out Shakespeare ’s sonnet about envying this man’s art and that man’s scope, I may want to do some free-writing with my class on what they most envy in their friends and enemies, perhaps how envy feels, and what they themselves possess that others might envy. This helps create a familiar context for the poem, so that the unfamiliar language and inverted word order won’t bring fifteen-year-olds to a grinding halt. Then I’d read it aloud—again, before they see it on the page in all its footnoted and eternal greatness. I might even memorize the poem so I could present it with the conviction and urgency that eye contact can give.

Another reason to start off with some current poems is that the contemporary poet is less prone to view a poem as an opportunity to do some overt teaching: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” “The proper study of mankind is man.” Teenagers get enough of that from their parents and from us, so it’s not surprising if they prefer poems that give them a little more leeway—that let them burrow (or skim) to see what the poem has to offer them , not Mankind.

Finally, because a contemporary poem is most apt to be a free-verse personal lyric, expressed in familiar language and syntax, it offers the reader, student and teacher alike, an immediate invitation to “look in thy heart and write.” Most of us are not about to try to emulate Keats, Yeats, or Wallace Stevens, much as we may admire them. Sharon Olds , Nikki Giovanni , Quincy Troupe ? Maybe.

“Leaving a Loop” actually began with my discovery of a woven pot holder in the drawer of the studio where I’m now writing. There is a little shiver that I think most writers feel when we sense that a poem will happen soon—that a pebble has been cast into the pond. If I can, I sit down right away with a pencil and try to feel where the ripples want me to go. If it happens to me when I’ve gone for a run, I start trying out lines aloud and memorizing them one by one, as if coiling a rope with no visible end. Since I can’t see the end, I try to censor nothing—even if a line or image or word makes no logical sense to me at the time. I let past, present, and future run together, all parts of the braid. I try to leave room for the reader: See? Look here! Just trace this with your finger, feel how loose the weave is? And I try to be absolutely honest, no matter how embarrassing the detail is that’s suddenly appeared on the page or how uncomfortable the emotion that’s surfaced, or how unanswerable the question.

Later, as the shiver goes away—but never entirely, because revisiting the poem can revive it—I’ll listen to the tone and the music, and then rethink the line breaks, maybe consider whether to use stanzas. Where do the reader and I need more air, more pause to think and feel? Where does the emotional shift seem to require a rhythmic shift as well? It’s sometimes very hard to hear the tone of one’s own poem, especially in the first draft. Will the reader, that mysterious Other, hear what I do? Is this adjective misleading? Is it a false note in the poem’s imagery or music?

As I wrote, I was under the spell of the pot holder itself—its sudden appearance, the memories it evoked, the mysterious feel of the twilit studio where I’d be writing for three weeks and the accompanying mystery: why did finding this square of soft colors and rags feel so promising? Why was I so profoundly stirred? It was physical; my eyes were blurry with tears, my hands were shaking. Yet I felt hopeful—almost a spiritual faith that something was about to be revealed.

One kind of reading that I invite students to do, especially with a contemporary poem, is to make a list of questions they’d like to ask the author. If he or she is a fellow student or the teacher or a visiting poet, or if there’s a taped interview available, the students may get answers. But a class can also move deep into a poem simply by entertaining one another’s questions.

What might you ask about “Leaving a Loop”?

Writing and reading feed each other. When we start writing our own poems, we become much more aware of Dickinson’s or Blake ’s miraculous compression of meaning through image, much more curious (accepting, even) of William Carlos Williams ’s line breaks. As we read Whitman or Ginsberg , we may realize that our own poems are shutting out rather a lot of the known world. So, engaging with my poem may lead you to your poetry shelves or into writing a poem of your own.

Yes, the odd line break between “thirty-two” and “pot holders” was deliberate, because I wanted to convey the child’s pride (and obsession—she kept count) and also to dramatize the word “pot holder,” which I’d semi-consciously held off till this late in the poem. Yes, the line near the end, “I didn’t know I was making a gift,” was a conscious echo of the line up near the middle, “I wasn’t making gifts.” But I hadn’t planned the echo; I accepted the idea the moment it hit me—“Oh, yes, that feels right. It corrects, it expands, the earlier line. How interesting.” One advantage of having students write poetry is that they are then much less apt to commit the “intentional fallacy”—to assume, for instance, that Frost intended “sleep” to symbolize “death” in the line “miles to go before I sleep.” The possibility is there in the complex weave of the poet’s conscious and unconscious choices—for those readers whose predilections lead them into it. Student poets discover this weave for themselves if we ask them to talk or write about their own poetry-writing process.

Yes, the long, run-on opening sentence of the poem was intentional—in the sense that as I wrote it I was beginning to realize this was a blurry, dreamy, pushpull kind of poem that was pursuing an unknown end and therefore shouldn’t have much punctuation. And the last sentence—even though by then the web has been unhooked from the loom—is also a deliberate run-on because I’m still feeling my way to the discovery about heat, which in the actual writing didn’t occur till the very last line; in the previous two lines I was still rippling outward, or inward, noticing, remembering, wondering.

As a teenager I used to wait patiently for the muse to descend. But I don’t have time now—and neither do you. I try to engage her (him?) early in the morning when I’m still barely awake and the night’s images—visual and verbal—are surfacing. Or at night when I’m drowsy but not yet comatose. Poets, like athletes or musicians, need to practice regularly, so that when the inspiration and opportunity present themselves to make a perfect pass or give a memorable performance, they’ll be ready. I try to write and/or read poetry every day.

Students can be told, firmly, that yes, there will be moments of inspiration, but for now—there are assignments. Which they may twist somewhat to their own urgencies, and which may or may not turn out be poems they love and want to keep forever. I always add that I’ll be happy—even eager—to read any poems they write on their own. But tonight their assignment is to try writing rhythmic phrases and vivid images to whatever music they especially love.

Next day, after we listen to these phrases and talk about what it was like to write to music, I’ll give them their first actual poetry-writing assignment: “Write a poem about getting into someone else’s dream. Put us in that dream. And contrast it in very specific images to your own dreams or nightmares.”

Here’s my own “wrong dream” poem, which I recently used as a jumping off point for this assignment. In creating and trying out the exercise, I discovered that it’s important to give students time in class to jot down at least one dream of their own—in prose, maybe a stream-of-consciousness prose—and let them read a couple of classmates’ dreams, before they start writing the poem. (Watch out! If you once let them start retelling dreams aloud , it’s impossible to stem the tide!)

'It also helps to get them thinking about words. As a warm-up, ask them to list words they love the sound of. Words they hate the sounds of. And some colorful variations on a neutral verb like run or a common noun like house ( cave, hacienda, cocoon, airport, chateau, igloo, garbage bin, temple, row house, cell, tarpaper shack, Sheol, plantation, cabin, adobe, camp, ant hill, monastery, soddie, burrow, nest, pond, tent, heart, mind, vein, shoe, trailer, etc.). Do make time for them to share these words aloud. We all need to be reminded that poems are made of words, and that language, with its mix of indigenous words, colonialisms, immigrant additions, regional dialects, coinages, slang or argot, and jargon of all kinds, is a remarkably gorgeous hodgepodge. Dreams may be blurry, but it takes rich and precise language to convey your own unique, blur.

Lost It’s tawdry, and there’s way too much noise. I never dream of freaks, midways, junk food, and who’s the skin-tight mother, jumbo rollers, she’s squealing and flaps a damp condom at me from the bumper cars I don’t want to meet this dream’s owner, some overgrown boy I never would have dated but here he comes singing to me across a crowded room and I’m soulful, in white, eyes dilating, he and my mother the squealer take a shine to each other she shows him my baby pictures, oh God not that one, get me back into trees and ponds and nocturnes or at least the one where I can’t find my room and end up teaching math in a foreign tongue to the whole football team and it’s business school and nobody but me knows stream of consciousness and anyway they’re all asleep

I had a lot of fun writing this—though I admit to censoring the condoms when I read it to freshmen.

Now, try to write your own “wrong dream” poem. Find a space and a chair where you’re comfortable. Near a window? In a corner? Outdoors? Do you have a favorite notebook? One where you can copy down lines of poems you like, songs, graffiti, the odd fact, the catchy, overheard turn of phrase, the ambivalent headline, bits of news, jokes, dreams, and recipes? Where you can stash snapshots, leaves, clippings? If it’s a brand new notebook, don’t be afraid of sullying that first white page with a first effort. My own notebooks are full of first drafts that nobody is going to see. Fill the first page with doodles, if that feels better, and go on to the second. Do you find inspiration at the computer? I need the physical connection of pencil to hand to the rest of me; the computer suits me fine for revising. But some poets start right off on the screen.

Leave yourself at least an hour. The kids will have had class time as well as homework time, remember. Do the warm-ups they’re doing. Read your dream and your word lists aloud. Yes, aloud. This is important to tell the class as well. Some of your rhythms and mouthmusings may start spinning a poem before you even know what’s happening. Close your eyes for a few minutes. Drift . . .

All right, time’s up. Tomorrow when you go around the circle or up and down the rows, asking each student to read a couple of favorite lines or to write them up on the wall on the colored mural paper with a magic marker, you’ll have some lines to share, too. You may be very proud of them, or you may feel that they pale beside those of your promising student poets. I find the latter discovery both humbling and inspiring, though which sensation dominates depends on how the day’s been going! You’ll be curious to compare notes with them about the experience of writing the poem. And because you aren’t the expert now but the students’ professional colleague, you’ll probably pick up a lot of interesting insights into the nature of writing poetry during this discussion.

You may also gain some insights into your students. Here’s a “wrong dream” poem by one of the girls in my freshman class. More than anything she’d said or written all first term, this poem helped me understand the brusque, sardonic, boastful person I’d been trying to like. When she read it to the class, it left them totally silent—a real achievement with this group! I took the opportunity to point out that silence can be a tribute, an indication to a writer that she’s moved or challenged her listeners in a really significant way. Several students nodded. “Not every poem has to be discussed, either,” I said. “Some just percolate through your mind for the rest of the day.”

dream this isn’t my dream i don’t move like this i don’t walk this way and these aren’t my clothes this is my body, but i’m not in control here i’m saying something to this boy who seems familiar suddenly i can see myself as if reflected in the water, under a dock whosever dream this is has idealized me i’m not this pretty i don’t stand with this grace my hair is more frizzy and never stays in beautiful ringlets whosever dream this is has certainly never seen MY hands because these have fingers too long and perfect with clean even nails and most of all this isn’t me because whosever dream this is loves me for myself My own dreams are odd and generally i’m not allowed to see myself because i already know what i’ll see some dreadful caricature weighing a hundred pounds more than even I do with short staticky hair my grandmother ’s nose no this isn’t my dream i’m beautiful here.

As a result of this assignment, you and your fellow poets may decide to start keeping dream journals. Or you may decide to go in search of other dream poems. Maybe you’ll turn up Coleridge’s “ Kubla Khan .” Or Blake’s “Chimney Sweep,” with the boys locked up in coffins of black and the angel who unlocks them with a golden key. Or my all-time favorite love poem, Margaret Atwood ’s “Variation on the Word Sleep ”—“I would like to give you the silver / branch, the small white flower, the one / word that will protect you / from the grief at the center / of your dream . . . .” (2)

Or maybe that most haunting of villanelles, Theodore Roethke’s “ The Waking ”: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.” (3)

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems , ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1960) 534-535.
Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987) 77. Both volumes contain poems in a wide range of voices, including mythological women, animals, and a Canadian pioneer woman, and so offer fine examples for students writing persona poems. The poems are also inspiring for young feminists and serious young women writers. Students who already know Atwood as a novelist or know the movie of The Handmaid’s Tale may be curious about her poems.
Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1975) 104. Roethke’s memorable music, his close, tender, witty observations of plants and animals and his haunting poems about the father/son relationship are important to share with students. And with a little help, the sexiness of “I Knew a Woman” can become dazzlingly accessible.

Innovative Instrument Reveals Hidden Features Deep Inside the Van Allen Radiation Belts

A new instrument is using advanced detection techniques and leveraging an orbit with specific characteristics to increase our understanding of the Van Allen belts—regions surrounding Earth that contain energetic particles that can endanger both robotic and human space missions. Recently, the instrument provided a unique view of changes to this region that were brought on by an intense magnetic storm in May 2024.

The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the U.S. Explorer 1 mission in 1958 marked a prominent milestone in space physics and demonstrated that Earth’s magnetosphere efficiently accelerates and traps energetic particles. The inner belt contains protons in the MeV (million electric volt) to GeV (10 9 electric volt) range, and even higher concentrations of energetic electrons of 100s of keV (1000 electric volt) to MeV are found in both the inner belt and the outer belt.

The energetic electrons in these belts—also referred to as “killer electrons”—can have detrimental effects on spacecraft subsystems and are harmful to astronauts performing extravehicular activities. Understanding the source, loss, and varying concentrations of these electrons has been a longstanding research objective. High-energy resolution and clean measurements of these energetic electrons in space are required to further our understanding of their properties and enable more reliable prediction of their intensity.

Overcoming the challenges of measuring relativistic electrons in the inner belt

Measuring energetic electrons cleanly and accurately has been a challenge, especially in the inner belt, where MeV to GeV energy protons also exist. NASA's Van Allen Probes, which operated from 2012 to 2019 in low inclination, geo-transfer-like orbits, showed that instruments traversing the heart of the inner radiation belt are subject to penetration by the highly energetic protons located in that region. The Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) and the Magnetic Electron and Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS) instruments onboard the Van Allen Probes were heavily shielded but were still subject to inner-belt proton contamination.

To attempt to minimize these negative effects, a University of Colorado Boulder team led by Dr. Xinlin Li, designed the R elativistic E lectron P roton T elescope i ntegrated l ittle e xperiment (REPTile)—a simplified and miniaturized version of REPT—to fly onboard the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE). An effort supported by the National Science Foundation, the 3-Unit CSSWE CubeSat operated in a highly inclined low Earth orbit (LEO) from 2012 to 2014. In this highly inclined orbit, the spacecraft and the instruments it carried were only exposed to the inner-belt protons in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region where the Earth’s magnetic field is weaker, which greatly reduced the time that protons impacted the measurement of electrons.

REPTile’s success motivated a team, also led by Dr. Xinlin Li, to design REPTile-2—an advanced version of REPTile—to be hosted on the Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) mission. Like CSSWE, CIRBE operates in a highly inclined low-Earth orbit to ensure the exposure to damaging inner-belt protons is minimized. The team based the REPTile-2 design on REPTile but incorporated two additional technologies—guard rings and Pulse Height Analysis—to enable clean, high-energy-resolution measurements of energetic electrons, especially in the inner belt.

Two team members in blue lab coats at a desk working on a structure made of multiple flat black pieces, while another team member in a green lab coat looks on.

As shown on the left in Figure 3, the field of view (FOV) of REPTile-2 is 51 o . Electrons and protons enter the FOV and are measured when they reach a stack of silicon detectors where they deposit their energies. However, very energetic protons (energy greater than 60 MeV) could penetrate through the instrument’s tungsten and aluminum shielding and masquerade as valid particles, thus contaminating the intended measurements. To mitigate this contamination, the team designed guard rings that surround each detector. These guard rings are electronically separated from the inner active area of each detector and are connected by a separate electric channel. When the guard rings are triggered (i.e., hit by particles coming outside of the FOV), the coincident measurements are considered invalid and are discarded. This anti-coincidence technique enables cleaner measurements of particles coming through the FOV.

Left: a striped rectangular platform with a pink cylinder on top. Middle: device constructed from multiple square, flat pieces. Right: a gold rectangular piece of equipment with multiple layers.

To achieve high energy resolution, the team also applied full Pulse Height Analysis (PHA) on REPTile-2. In PHA, the magnitude of measured charge in the detector is directly proportional to the energy deposited from the incident electrons. Unlike REPTile, which employed a simpler energy threshold discrimination method yielding three channels for the electrons, REPTile-2 offers enhanced precision with 60 energy channels for electron energies ranging from 0.25 – 6 MeV. The REPT instrument onboard the Van Allen Probes also employed PHA but while REPT worked very well in the outer belt, yielding fine energy resolution, it did not function as well in the inner belt since the instrument was fully exposed to penetrating energetic protons because it did not have the guard rings implemented.

four team members wearing lab coats and protective gloves standing next to a rectangular structure housed in a clear cube.

CIRBE and REPTile-2 Results

CIRBE's launch, secured through the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI), took place aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter-7 mission on April 15, 2023. REPTile-2, activated on April 19, 2023, has been performing well, delivering valuable data about Earth's radiation belt electrons. Many features of the energetic electrons in the Van Allen belts have been revealed for the first time, thanks to the high-resolution energy and time measurements REPTile-2 has provided.

Figure 5 shows a sample of CIRBE/REPTile-2 measurements from April 2024, and illustrates the intricate drift echoes or “zebra stripes” of energetic electrons, swirling around Earth in distinct bunches. These observations span a vast range across the inner and outer belts, encompassing a wide spectrum of energies and electron fluxes extending over six orders of magnitude. By leveraging advanced guard rings, Pulse Height Analysis (PHA), and a highly inclined LEO orbit, REPTile-2 is delivering unprecedented observations of radiation belt electrons.

In fact, the team recently announced that measurements from CIRBE/REPTile-2 have revealed a new temporary third radiation belt composed of electrons and sandwiched between the two permanent belts. This belt formed during the magnetic storm in May 2024, which was the largest in two decades . While such temporary belts have been seen after big storms previously, the data from CIRBE/REPTile-2 are providing a new viewpoint with higher energy resolution data than before. Scientists are currently studying the data to better understand the belt and how long it might stick around — which could be many months.

PROJECT LEAD

Dr. Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS

Heliophysics Flight Opportunities for Research & Technology (H-FORT) program, National Science Foundation

Related Terms

Heliophysics
Heliophysics Division
Science-enabling Technology
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Unlocking the Maternal Brain: Groundbreaking Research Reveals Stunning Changes During Pregnancy

Irvine, Calif., September 16, 2024 — UC Irvine’s Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences is proud to announce a new study published in Nature Neuroscience , revealing remarkable insights into the human brain during pregnancy. Conducted in collaboration with UC Irvine’s Associate Professor Elizabeth Chrastil, Ph.D., and UC Santa Barbara’s Associate Professor Emily Jacobs, Ph.D., this research presents the first comprehensive map of how a human brain undergoes neuroanatomical changes throughout pregnancy and beyond.

Pregnancy is a transformative period for the human body, involving not just physical changes but significant brain remodeling. Until now, these changes have remained largely unknown. “By conducting frequent scans — every two weeks — along with blood samples, we were able to see the widespread changes that occur during the course of pregnancy and how they relate to the dramatic rise in hormones throughout pregnancy,” explains Professor Chrastil. The study found that while gray matter volume decreased in specific regions, white matter integrity — crucial for brain communication — increased during pregnancy, only to return to baseline levels postpartum.

This discovery, made possible through advanced precision imaging, uncovers a level of brain plasticity previously thought to be absent in adulthood. “We were able to uncover large, but transient, increases in white matter integrity, which would have been missed in a before vs. after design,” notes Daniela Cossio, a graduate student in Professor Chrastil’s lab who led the white matter analysis.

One of the most significant challenges in this study was the vast complexity of tracking and analyzing the brain’s structural changes over such a long period. Professor Jacobs praised the team’s dedication, saying, “Laura Pritschet and the study team were a tour-de-force, conducting a rigorous suite of analyses that generated new insights into the human brain and its incredible capacity for plasticity in adulthood.”

The implications of these findings are vast. Beyond broadening our understanding of maternal brain adaptations, this research opens new doors for addressing postpartum mental health issues and other pregnancy-related neurological disorders. “There are now FDA-approved treatments for postpartum depression, but early detection remains elusive. The more we learn about the maternal brain, the better chance we’ll have to provide relief,” says Laura Pritschet, Ph.D., the study’s first author.

Understanding the nuances of the maternal brain can provide vital improvements to women’s healthcare, enabling healthier pregnancies and better outcomes. The future holds incredible promise as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the human brain during this extraordinary life phase.

For those interested in contributing to further research on the maternal brain, visit here to learn more about how you can participate in shaping the future of maternal health.

About the University of California, Irvine Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences: Recognized for its pioneering research and academic excellence, the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences plays a crucial role in the university’s status among the nation’s top 10 public universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. It offers a broad spectrum of degree programs in the biological sciences, fostering innovation and preparing students for leadership in research, education, medicine and industry. Nestled in a globally acclaimed and economically vibrant community, the school contributes to the university’s impact as Orange County’s largest employer and a significant economic contributor. Through its commitment to exploring life’s complexities, the Dunlop School embodies the UCI legacy of innovation and societal impact. For more on the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences, visit https://www.bio.uci.edu/ .

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September 2024 wellness walk.

LOVE Sculpture on Locust Walk

Penn Museum, 3260 South St.

Penn Abroad Fair

Left: Penn students on a train in Japan. Right: Penn students under a portico in Japan.

11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Perry World House, 3803 Locust Walk

Penn Student Making Workshop

6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

How everyday stress impacts cigarette smoking

Supported by purm, second-year gabriella jean worked in the aha lab over the summer on a research project examining the association between everyday life stressors and cigarette smoking..

Gabriella Jean wears a pants suit while standing on College Walk.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 28.3 million U.S. adults currently smoke cigarettes , in spite of the clear and deadly links between cigarette smoking and cancer, and between smoking and damage to nearly every organ in the body. The majority of smokers want to stop, but fewer than 10% successfully quit each year.

Over the summer, in the Addiction, Health, & Adolescence (AHA!) Lab in the Annenberg School for Communication , Gabriella Jean, a second-year economics major in the College of Arts & Sciences , worked with principal investigator David Lydon-Staley on a research project studying the association between everyday life stressors—such as financial stress or an unpleasant social interaction—and cigarette smoking. Jean applied for and received the research opportunity through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program , offered through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships .

The goal of the AHA! Lab is to study everyday behaviors and experiences as they unfold over relatively short time scales, such as day to day or hour to hour, in the context of everyday life. The Lab’s research on everyday stressors and smoking, part of a larger study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, investigates the emotions of daily cigarette smokers and their impact on smoking behavior.

“What David and I are mostly interested in is the relationship between everyday stressors and smoking, as well as everyday stressors and both craving and negative emotion, such as sadness, anxiety, and anger,” Jean says. “We are trying to understand whether or not, when you experience a stressor, it increases your negative affect, craving, and likelihood of smoking when you’re trying to quit.”

Jean and Lydon-Staley’s project, which utilizes the ecological momentary assessment method, included a sample size of 156 daily cigarette smokers from Philadelphia. Participants were recruited through advertisements on SEPTA, radio, and TV, and collaboration with Penn ’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction and the Perelman School of Medicine . Enrollees visited the AHA! Lab and had an app installed on their phone that pinged them 10 times a day for 10 days during a smoking cessation attempt, asking them questions about their cravings, their smoking behavior, and their stress exposure as they went about their daily lives.

“I think the nice thing about this study is that because so much of it is happening out in the world, and because there are so few demands on asking people to come to the University, we ended up with a pretty good representation of Philadelphia and its diversity,” says Lydon-Staley, who is also an assistant professor of communication at Annenberg.

After analyzing the data, Jean and Lydon-Staley identified a strong relationship between everyday stressors, negative affect, and cigarette craving. They found that in moments when study participants reported experiencing a stressor, their craving was higher, their negative affect was heightened, and they were more likely to have smoked, using cigarettes as sort of a coping mechanism.

Jean says everyday stressors in general can trigger the urge to smoke, but she noticed an assortment of individual differences.

“Me personally, my stressor could be school, and that would affect my craving, but as for another individual, their stressor might be finances,” she says. “The stressors are different for each individual and they can change from day to day, but what remains consistent is that those stressors really affect your smoking, negative emotions, and cravings.”

Potential solutions, says Jean, could be developing new ways to help individuals cope with their daily stressors and providing them with available resources.

“I think if they become more resilient or they’re just more able to cope with their day-to-day lives and issues, they will be able to fight against it,” she says. “And from my readings, there is indeed a strong relationship between interventions that decrease cravings and a decrease in smoking.”

Lydon-Staley says Jean was a great addition to the research project and is a “really smart, really motivated, and very curious student.”

“She really just jumped into the project with lots of energy,” he says. “She started by reading very widely and deeply in the literature. When it was time to move to data analysis, she was able to approach the data analysis with a good sense of what we were looking for, which helped her then interpret the results.”

Jean, who is from Haiti, was pitched a couple of projects by Lydon-Staley at the start of her research opportunity. She says she was interested in studying smoking behaviors because her great uncle and one of her mom’s closest friends were both smokers who died from cancer. When she noticed some of her friends begin to smoke as teenagers, she became even more curious about smoking behaviors in general. The summer research project, she says, was a great opportunity for her to study something she has been curious about for a long time.

“Also, it was my way to be able to help because, most importantly, the goal of our research is to be able to improve the interventions that are meant to help people quit smoking,” Jean says.

At Convocation, a call to ‘come together’

Move-In coordinators gather signs to put around Penn’s campus.

Campus & Community

Move-In coordinators help ease transition to college

Forty-eight second-year, third-year, and fourth-year students will be on the ground during Move-In to assist approximately 6,000 new and returning Quakers.

Two nurses guiding a prone patient into a proton imaging machine.

Health Sciences

The power of protons

Penn Medicine has treated more than 10,000 cancer patients at three proton therapy centers across the region, including the largest and busiest center in the world—while also leading the way in research to expand the healing potential of these positive particles.

To Penn’s Class of 2024: ‘The world needs you’

The University celebrated graduating students on Monday during the 268th Commencement.

students climb the love statue during hey day

Class of 2025 relishes time together at Hey Day

An iconic tradition at Penn, third-year students were promoted to senior status.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

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Clinical Rsch Project Manager

Anesthesiology
Columbia University Medical Center
Opening on: Sep 17 2024
Job Type: Officer of Administration
Bargaining Unit:
Regular/Temporary: Regular
End Date if Temporary:
Hours Per Week: 35
Standard Work Schedule:
Salary Range: $69,300 - $85,000

Position Summary

The Clinical Research Project Manager in the Department of Anesthesiology, Divisions of Critical Care Medicine and Cardiac Anesthesiology, will be responsible for managing the clinical trial projects in the lab. The lab conducts a variety of clinical research studies, including studies of sepsis, cognitive dysfunction, delirium, mechanical ventilation, and complications after surgery. This position generally reports to the Division Chief(s) of Critical Care Medicine and Cardiac Anesthesiology.

Responsibilities

Provide leadership in developing and implementing clinical trial projects. Work closely with senior administrators to facilitate the team's work and coordinate or manage the team's initiatives and projects.
Supervise research coordinators to ensure good clinical practice in research.
Manage multiple large and smaller complex clinical trial projects simultaneously.
Partner with sponsors and team leaders to strategize team project plans. Focus on critical success factors, project milestones, and deliverables and develop contingency plans.
Lead project team meetings, including reviewing action plans and tracking project milestones. Update action plans weekly and prompt accountable individuals to ensure timely task completion. Support activities of project teams and maintain accurate documentation of team minutes.
Design communication strategies for project progress. Ensure timely and consistent communication of project priorities, status, timelines, and deliverables to the user community.
Design data collection methods and data analyses to support team efforts. Interpret and report data to various audiences and use data to make recommendations for process improvements.
Ensure appropriate project prioritization and requests for resources. Ensure projects are managed and delivered on time, within budget, and meet the strategic and operational needs of the department.
Understand the requirements of various ethical and regulatory bodies, guiding the study in conforming to those requirements, and coordinating any necessary audit processes.
Prepare study materials and establish procedures to ensure adherence to study protocols and administrative requirements.
Lead the recruitment, training, appraisal, retention, and supervision of study team members.
Coordinate applications, and subsequent amendments, to ethical and regulatory bodies.
Perform site visits to facilitate study setup and initiation, regular monitoring visits during patient recruitment, and close-out visits on study completion.
Lead study oversight groups by organizing and facilitating meetings, providing reports and documentation to committees, and following up on agreed actions.
Ensure timely recruitment of study participants with secure randomization processes and subsequent efficient and effective data management.
Ensure that all study adverse events are appropriately investigated by the study staff and accurately reported to the investigators and regulatory bodies as required.
Monitor study progress to ensure compliance with and adherence to the study plan, and identify, evaluate, and rectify problems.
Support investigators in the collection and monitoring of study data and liaise with collaborators, study doctors, and the data manager to ensure follow-up information is kept up-to-date, accurately completed, and that loss of patient data is kept to a minimum.
Prepare research progress and monitoring reports, organize and minute regular meetings with the appropriate Steering Committee and Data Monitoring Committees, ensuring compliance with Research Governance, Good Clinical Practice, Data Protection, and ethical requirements, as applicable.
Provide regular and ad-hoc information, both written and verbal, to all study participants and sponsors, including reports, updates, guidance, preformed commitments, and possibly a newsletter, or similar, as appropriate.
Coordinate the preparation and publication of data, reports, and information, ensuring compliance with applicable contractual and ethical requirements.
Ensure the inclusion of patients and public involvement and engagement group representatives at the appropriate levels and times.
Act as the first point of contact for all external and internal agencies.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in education and experience, plus four years of related experience

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s degree in business or healthcare preferred, with 3-5 years of related work experience
CITI Certification preferred

Other Requirements

Minimum computer skills:

Proficiency with word processing, spreadsheet programs and MAC’s required.
Advanced skills with Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Work, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access, and other web-based applications.
Ability to produce complex documents, perform analysis, and maintain databases.

General skills:

Experience in meeting facilitation and the ability to lead group discussions.
Ability to make decisions guided by general instructions and practices requiring some interpretation. May make recommendations for solving problems of moderate complexity and importance.
Ability to address highly varied, complex, and often non-recurring problems requiring staff input, innovative, creative, and Lean diagnostic techniques to resolve issues.
Ability to set goals and determine how to accomplish defined results with some guidelines. Manager/Director provides broad guidance and overall direction.
Ability to summarize and communicate moderately complex information in varied written formats to internal and external parties.
Ability to lead collaborative teams for larger projects or groups both internal and external to the Medical Center and across functional areas. Results have implications for the management and operations of multiple areas of the organization.

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.

Commitment to Diversity

Columbia university is dedicated to increasing diversity in its workforce, its student body, and its educational programs. achieving continued academic excellence and creating a vibrant university community require nothing less. in fulfilling its mission to advance diversity at the university, columbia seeks to hire, retain, and promote exceptionally talented individuals from diverse backgrounds. , share this job.

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COMMENTS

EH -- Researching Poems: Strategies for Poetry Research
This page addresses the research process -- the things that should be done before the actual writing of the paper -- and strategies for engaging in the process. Although this LibGuide focuses on researching poems or poetry, this particular page is more general in scope and is applicable to most lower-division college research assignments.
PDF English 12 poetry research project
English 12 poetry research project. Poetry research project. Students will find three poems by the poet that cover the thematic idea of identity. You will choose one of these poems from this booklet, and two on your own. Students will also write three paragraphs for this assignment. • 1 paragraph is about the poet.
How To Write A Poetry Research Paper
9. Exploring Themes. 10. Analyzing Discourse and Context. 11. Finding Inspiration. Writing a poetry research paper can be an intimidating task for students. Even for experienced writers, the process of writing a research paper on poetry can be daunting. However, there are a few helpful tips and guidelines that can help make the process easier.
A Guide to Researching Poetry
Tips for Researching Poetry. Among many other delightful signs of spring, April brings us National Poetry Month. Springtime during a pandemic is a contradictory mix of delights and shadows-an imperfectly perfect opportunity for poetry.. This is the 25th year we've been graced with National Poetry Month.If you regularly recognize National Poetry Month, it might be a welcome reminder of ...
How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)
Main Paragraphs. Now, we come to the main body of the essay, the quality of which will ultimately determine the strength of our essay. This section should comprise of 4-5 paragraphs, and each of these should analyze an aspect of the poem and then link the effect that aspect creates to the poem's themes or message.
#PoemResearch: Notes on Researching as a Poet
Late in Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner's novel about a young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, we receive this capsule description of the research project our narrator has successfully evaded and talked around:. Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long and research-driven poem, whatever that ...
ENG 102
This guide is designed to help you complete an English 102 research paper about a poem. ... This guide from the SCC Library provides resources on how to properly include sources in a research project without plagiarism, whether through good note-taking, following the research process, or using direct quotations, paraphrasing, or summarizing ...
Writing About Poetry
In order to write effectively about poetry, one needs a clear idea of what the point of writing about poetry is. When you are assigned an analytical essay about a poem in an English class, the goal of the assignment is usually to argue a specific thesis about the poem, using your analysis of specific elements in the poem and how those elements ...
Research Guides: Poems and Poets: Finding Poems
The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a peer-reviewed digital archive and research project devoted to the poetry of the long eighteenth century. It includes searchable full text of over 3,000 poems, building on the electronic texts created by the Text Creation Partnership from Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Poetry Activities: Six Simple Ways to Make Poetry Instruction Engaging
Make it a research assignment where students study the type of poem they want to write, become the masters, and teach the class about those styles. In reflecting about allowing choice as it relates to writing poems, I'm reminded of a time one of my students surprised me with his work during a multigenre research project. He wrote twenty ...
Poem Analysis
Changing the World Together. We believe in helping the world, so we have chosen these charities to donate to every month. A website dedicated to analyzing poetry from past and present, to provide a database of articles to summarize and critically analyze any poem.
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Requirement 2: Research--Secondary research is required for this assignment; you must utilize at least three secondary sources. Requirement 3: Length--your explication should be at least four pages to fully develop a theme with a thesis statement and topic sentences and to be able to use examples and secondary support.
How to Write Poetry Research Paper: Complete Guide for Students
A poetry research paper is an insight into the meaning hidden behind either common or extraordinary word combinations. Besides, the research papers are more complicated than essays. This assignment requires you to do thorough work, to be attentive to the details and apply the available information, theory, and even facts from the author's ...
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Around the World is another one of those fun poetry activities middle school students will love. Begin by having all but one of the students sit in their seats. That one student stands behind a classmate. This is the starting point. On the count of three, the teacher calls out a word. The student who is standing and the student sitting in front ...
Poetry Draft Assignment
Introduction. For this assignment, students will examine drafts of poems from the Rose Library's poetry collections, looking for insights offered by an author's changes between drafts and the published poem. After examining the drafts, students will write an argument-driven, formal essay analyzing the poem and the author's choice and are ...
7 Poetry Activities Students Love
Use them to lead students to more thoughtful extended written responses. One way we can scaffold students' poetry analysis is with an that focuses on breaking down figurative language, form, structure, and diction. Use visually pleasing, step-by-step to help students prepare their literary analysis response.
A Full Guide to Writing a Perfect Poem Analysis Essay
Poetry has a lot more complex structure and cannot be considered without its special rhythm, images, as well as implied and obvious sense. While analyzing the poem, the students need to do in-depth research as to its content, taking into account the effect the poetry has or may have on the readers. Preparing for the Poetry Analysis Writing
Practice As Research: Poetic Inquiry
The purpose of the poetry as research group is to offer an opportunity to grapple with these concerns through discussion, reviews and critiques of poetic pieces emerging from autoethnographic or ethnographic research, poetic inquiry and other Poetry As Research work. ... Read about this co-creative project and methodologies for evaluating its ...
ish: How to Write Poemish (Research) Poetry
Discussion has occurred around what constitutes quality research poetry, with some direction on how a researcher, who is a novice poet, might go about writing good enough research poetry. In an effort to increase the existing conversation, the authors review research poetry literature and ideas from art poets on how to read, write, and revise poetry.
Sample Assignment Sheet
The Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto is known for assimilating the style of pop song lyrics into his poems. He writes his own lyrics in a very abstract language. A good example is his poem "End of the World": At the end of the melancholy world. men read the newspapers. Indifferent men eating oranges. that flame like the sun.
20 Poetry Research Paper Topics and Ideas
Step-by-step Instructions for Writing the Poetry Research Paper. It can be challenging to write a research paper about poetry if you are given the assignment. But if you take the appropriate method, you can divide it into manageable steps. The following is a step-by-step tutorial on how to write an effective poetry research paper: Step 1 ...
(PDF) Poetry as Literature Review
Feeling the pen scribble over the page, Physically out of control of the paper, Exposing the inside of a poet's heart. This leads me to discuss how poetry can help unravel concepts that might ...
The Start: Writing Your Own Poem
Dr. Judy Rowe Michaels is poet in residence and English teacher at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as a poet in the schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.The author of two books on teaching poetry and writing, both published by NCTE (Risking Intensity and Dancing With Words), she has also two collections of poems, The Forest of Wild Hands and, most recently ...
Innovative Instrument Reveals Hidden Features Deep Inside the Van Allen
A new instrument is using advanced detection techniques and leveraging an orbit with specific characteristics to increase our understanding of the Van Allen belts—regions surrounding Earth that contain energetic particles that can endanger both robotic and human space missions. Recently, the instrument provided a unique view of changes to this region that were brought on […]
Unlocking the Maternal Brain: Groundbreaking Research Reveals Stunning
Recognized for its pioneering research and academic excellence, the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences plays a crucial role in the university's status among the nation's top 10 public universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. It offers a broad spectrum of degree programs in the biological sciences, fostering innovation ...
How everyday stress impacts cigarette smoking
The summer research project, she says, was a great opportunity for her to study something she has been curious about for a long time. "Also, it was my way to be able to help because, most importantly, the goal of our research is to be able to improve the interventions that are meant to help people quit smoking," Jean says.
Clinical Rsch Project Manager
The Clinical Research Project Manager in the Department of Anesthesiology, Divisions of Critical Care Medicine and Cardiac Anesthesiology, will be responsible for managing the clinical trial projects in the lab. The lab conducts a variety of clinical research studies, including studies of sepsis, cognitive dysfunction, delirium, mechanical ...

EH -- Researching Poems: Strategies for Poetry Research

Page Overview

Before You Begin

Characteristics of a Well-written Paper

Basic Research Strategy

Things to Keep in Mind

A Note on Sources

How To Write A Poetry Research Paper

Introduction

Outlining and Structure

Citing Sources

Using Imagery and Metaphor

Understanding Rhyme and Meter

Exploring Themes

Analyzing Discourse and Context

Finding Inspiration

Minnie Walters

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ENG 102 - Poetry Research

Write Your Paper/Project

How to Explicate a Poem

MLA Formatting for Papers

Incorporating Sources into a Research Project & Avoiding Plagiarism

Additional Resources

The Learning Center (TLC)

Questions? Ask a Librarian

Poems and Poets

Search the NYU Libraries Resources

Search other catalogs

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry

Searching the catalog

Digital Collections of Poetry (NYU access)

Other NYU databases with poetry content

Other Online Resources for Poetry

Poetry Activities: Six Simple Ways to Make Poetry Instruction Engaging

Entice them with music.

Write poems that are fun and nonthreatening.

Incorporate choice…

Put students in charge…

Focus on reading comprehension.

Use picture books.

Use poetry to teach a writing skill .

Play games.

13 Ways Pictures Inspire Students to Write Poetry

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Useful Links

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Outdoor Poetry Activities for Middle School