AP Poetry Unit

During this unit, students will study poetry terms, read a broad range of English poems and poets from the late middle ages to today, choose poems to explicate, and write a timed-essay response comparing and contrasting two poems.

Quizlet Poetry Terms: Quizzes on October 20th (93-113) and October 27th (114-135).

In this unit, we will practice literary vocabulary using Quizlet and within class discussions, written explications, and various in-class assessment activities.

Reading and Explications: From 10/17 to 10/27, you will have assigned readings each night; be prepared for class activities using the previous night’s poems.You must also turn in two explications per week (each must be 1 page, typed or handwritten in pen). You may choose which nights and on which poems to write. Four explications must have been handed in by 10/30. Handwritten pages count as 1/2 a typed page.

An explication is an analysis of a poem—analysis means breaking something down. Good readers read the poem they are going to explicate more than once; then, they consider the nine elements listed on page 3.

In an explication, the writer will start with a summary. However, the writer must then go on to make and support claims about what the poem is doing, saying, and showing. Writers must go deeper by making and supporting claims about how the poem is doing, saying, and showing. The explication should make reference to specific lines, words, and even entire stanzas to support claims, rather than simply re-telling. In a final paragraph, the writer may choose to address what he or she personally thought or felt about the poem.

Keep your AP Vocabulary list (pages 4 & 5) and a dictionary handy! Readers’vocabularies will often be stretched in reading and analyzing poetry!

Timed Essay: On 11/3, students will get a compare-contrast essay prompt concerning the two poems printed in this packet (pages 6 & 7). Students will handwrite this essayduring the class hour.

Rhythm and Meter Chart

The pattern of accented syllables creates different types of feet. What do the lines sound like, mostly? / The number of feet reveals the poem’s meter. For the most part, how many feet are in each line?*
RHYTHM
Iamb (u/) destroy (IAMBIC)
Trochee (/u) topsy (TROCHAIC)
Anapest (uu/) intervene (ANAPESTIC)
Dactyl (/uu) merrily (DACTYLIC)
Also, these feet may appear irregularly:
Spondee (//) hum drum
Pyrrhic (uu) the sea(son of )wheat / METER
  1. Monometer
  2. Dimeter
  3. Trimester
  4. Tetrameter
  5. Pentameter
  6. Hexameter
  7. Heptameter
  8. Octameter
*Note: Each foot either has two or three syllables, depending on the type of foot. Meter is not how many syllables are in a line, buthow many feet.

Poetry Choice Assignment

HW: 10/30 to 11/2

For the final week, students will choose a poet and then read and respond to his or her poetry.

Reading:

Note: Some poets may have material unsuitable for the school environment. Mrs. Lamp is available to choose appropriate poems for you to consider at your request.

➢From Monday to Thursday, students need to read 2 or more of the poet’s poems. There is a 100-line minimum requirement.

➢By 7:45 AM on Friday, 11/3, students must e-mail Mrs. Lamp links to the poems they read; the poems cannot be found online, direct Mrs. Lamp to a book available in the AHS library.

➢The final e-mail should include a brief summary of what each poem the student read does and means (see item #6 in TP-CAST on the next page).

Writing:

Note: handwritten pages count for ½ a typed page

➢By the start of class on 11/3, students must turn in a one-page explication on one of their chosen poet’s poems.

English

Romantics

William Blake (27-8)

William Wordsworth (29-32)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (32-3)

Lord Byron (34-7)

Percy Shelley (37-41)

John Keats (41-3)

Victorians

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (44)

Alfred Lord Tennyson (45-51)

Christina Rossetti (55-6)

Modernists

William Butler Yeats (69-72)

T.S. Eliot (78)

W. H. Auden (82)

Rudyard Kipling (65-8)

American

1800s

William Cullen Bryant

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Edgar Allan Poe

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Emily Dickinson

Walt Whitman

Stephen Crane

Carl Sandburg

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

American, continued

Modernism

Ezra Pound

e. e. cummings

Wallace Stevens

Gertrude Stein

William Carlos Williams

Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes

Countee Cullen

Confessional

Sylvia Plath

Beat Poets

Alan Ginsberg

Multiculturalism

Gwendolyn Brooks

Maya Angelou

Robert Hayden

Nikki Giovanni

TP-CAST

Explicating Poetry

Goal: Explain what and how the poem does and means.

What does this poem do? Is it meant to describe, compare, examine, narrate, argue, expose, reveal, depict, tell, or show something?

What does it mean? Is the poem sending a message (theme)? Does it have a main idea? What is the poem saying about human experience, motivation, or condition? What does the reader learn about the subject(s) of the poem?

  1. Title: The title may help reveal something the poem is supposed to do or mean!
  2. Paraphrase: Go stanza by stanza, writing in your own words what happens in the poem.
  3. Connotation: How do poetic devices contribute to the poem’s meaning/effect? It is not necessary to identify all poetic devices present. Focus on poetic devices that help support the conclusions you draw in your explication about what the poem does and means.
  4. Identify the Speaker or Persona. (Is the poem in first or third person? Is the speaker an invented character? Or a persona separate from the poet? What type of person is the speaker and to whom is he or she speaking?)
  5. Consider the Setting. (What is the time, place, event, or occasion? The setting may influence imagery, diction, tone/mood, and meaning.)
  6. Identify dominant Images.(When and how does the poet use sensory language, tapping into the five senses? What types of images are present—natural, violent, physical, etc.? Imagery can affect mood and convey meaning.)
  7. Note Dictionchoices. (What specific word choices stand out? Can the word choices be categorized—military, religious, nautical, simple, difficult, abstract, concrete, etc.? Does the poet make use of certain words’ connotations? In general, are the words’ connotations negative, positive, or neutral? Diction reveals tone and affects mood.)
  8. Analyze Figurative and Rhetorical Language. (Among other devices, look for metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, symbolism, irony, allusion, and puns. Figurative & rhetorical language often create strong images!)
  9. Analyze Sound Devices. (Among other devices, listen for alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, and repetition. Does the sound reinforce a specific tone, mood, image, or meaning?)
  1. Attitude: Determine the Tone of the poem. (What attitude toward the subject comes through in the speaker’s words? Diction, imagery, and other details can suggest the speaker’s tone. Use the tone words list. Tone is often multi-layered and can shift.)
  2. Shifts: Often, a poem shows the speaker gaining understanding or insight through experience or contemplation. Shifts may be indicated by transition words, punctuation, stanza divisions, changes in line/stanza length,changes in sound, and changes in diction. Often, tone shifts indicate a shift in perspective or message.
  3. Figure out the Meter, Rhyme Scheme, Form, & Structure to aid in finding shifts. (Is the poet using a standardized form, like a ballad, blank verse, or a villanelle? Does he or she ever break from that form’s conventions? Do you notice structural choices like inverted syntax, fragments, short/long sentences, periodic or cumulative sentences? Changes in meter, rhyme, and structure can indicate shifts in subject, tone, or meaning.)
  4. Theme: Determine the poem’sMain Idea or Message.

Quizlet: Poetic Forms

➢Form is the structure of the poem; it can be open(unstructured) or closed (highly structured). Free verse is an example of open form. Popular closed forms include the ballad, sonnet, sestina, and ode. One can identify form in poetry by considering meter, rhyme, diction, tone, and subject.

➢Ballads are anonymous, often tragic, story-telling songs that developed for centuries before being written down. They typically contain refrains (repeated stanzas), which may change slightly. Ballad meteruses four-line stanzas (quatrains) that rhyme ABCB.

➢Lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry expressing personal emotions or feelings, and is usually brief (besides odes) and spoken in the first person. These poems were originally set to lyre music in Ancient Greece. They typically rely on a regular meter, although the meter may change in the refrain. Typical forms include the sonnet, elegy, villanelle, and ode.

➢Odes are a type of lyric poetry that is relatively long, very serious, and discusses some noble subject in a thoughtful and dignified manner. They are elaborately structured, and they usually praise or glorify an event, an individual, or nature, discussing this subject on both an intellectual and emotional level.

➢Sestinais a form with six stanzas of sestets(six lines) and a final tercet (three lines); all stanzas have the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, with all six words appearing in the closing three-line tercet.

➢Sonnet is a form that uses 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

  • Petrarchan (Italian) Sonnets rhyme ABBAABBA / CDCDCD. This form uses an octave and then a sestet. They often use the octave to form a problem or a question, and then the sestet proposes a resolution. Usually, the ninth line initiates avolta (turn) that signals the move from proposition to resolution. When they do not use a problem/resolution structure, they still often use the ninth line for a volta in which there is a change in tone, mood, theme, or stance.
  • Shakespearean (English) Sonnets rhyme ABAB / CDCD / EFEF/ GG. This form uses three quatrains and a couplet. Usually, their third quatrain contains the volta, though Shakespeare usually put it in the couplet at the end, summarizing the poem or introducing a fresh look at the theme.

➢Terza Rima uses tercets(three-line stanzas) with the chain rhyme pattern ABA / BCB / CDC / DED… The pattern will end with either a single line or a couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the last tercet. If the last tercet was DED, the poem would end in an E or EE. In English poetry, tezra rima is usually written in iambic pentameter

➢Avillanelleis a nineteen-line lyric poem with only two rhymes and with certain lines repeating a specific pattern. Lines 1, 6, 12, and 18 are the same, as are lines 3, 9, 15, and 19.Lines 1 and 3 are repeated to form a final couplet.The lines rhyme ABA / ABA/ ABA/ ABA / ABA / ABAA.

Quizlet Poetry Terms

Sound

Alliteration: Repeated consonant sounds at the BEGINNING of words near one another.

Consonance: Repetition of a consonant sound within two or more words in close proximity.

Assonance: Repetition of a vowel sound within two or more words in close proximity.

Refrain: A repeated part of a poem

End-stopped Line: A line of poetry that has a pause at the end, typically indicated by a period, semicolon, or comma.

Enjambment: The poet is using this device when a line has no pause or stop at the end, but instead has uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line; this forces the reader to continue beyond the end of the line for a completion of the thought/phrase.

Caesura: A strong pause in the middle of a line of poetry, marked by punctuation (masculine) or after an unstressed syllable (feminine).

Rhyme

True Rhyme: The final accented vowel and all succeeding consonants or syllables are identical, but the preceding consonants are different. Ex: Great/Late or Skylight/Highlight. Also called "perfect rhyme."

Slant Rhyme: A type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not identical vowel sounds. Ex: Stress/Kiss or Dangerous/Prosperous. Also called "half rhyme."

Masculine Rhyme: A rhyme ending on a final stressed syllable. Ex: Spent/Went.

Feminine Rhyme: A rhyme of two or more syllables; sometimes called "double rhyme." Strictly speaking, the penultimate syllable should be stressed and the final one unstressed. Ex: Waken/Forsaken or Audition/Rendition.

Internal Rhyme: A word in the middle of a line rhymes with the end word on the same line OR a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word in the middle of the next line.

Rhythm and Meter

Rhythm: The specific pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. Determines the type of feet in a line, such as iambic rhythm.

Meter: A regular pattern a certain number of feet in lines of poetry, such as trimeter.

Ballad Meter: A four-line stanza rhymed ABCB. It will also have four feet in lines 1 & 3 and three feet in lines 2 & 4, making 14 feet in a stanza

Iamb: A foot that consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Ex: re-MARK.

Trochee: A foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable. Ex: CAR-ing.

Anapest: A foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a final stressed syllable. Ex: com-pre-HEND

Dactyl: A foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. Ex: CRIM-i-nal.

Spondee: A foot made of two stressed syllables. Ex: AIR-CRAFT.

Pyrrhic: A foot made of two unstressed syllables. Ex: (when the) blood creeps (and the) nerves prick.

Scansion: The process of marking lines of poetry to show the stressed and unstressed syllables, thus revealing the type of feet and the number of feet the lines contain.

Stanzas

Stanza: A group or "chunk" of lines in a poem, like a paragraph. They have different names depending on the number of lines they have, such as "tercet" or “quatrain."

Couplet: Two consecutive rhymed lines in a poem that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in the poem.

Tercet: A three-line stanza.

Quatrain: A four-line stanza.

Sestet: A six-line stanza.

Octave: An eight-line stanza.

Poetic Devices

Speaker: The voice behind the perspective (real or imagined) being advanced through a poem (like the narrator in a novel).

Volta: A "turn" of thought or argument

The Last Leaf

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

I saw him once before,

As he passed by the door,

And again

The pavement stones resound,

As he totters o’er the ground (5)

With his cane.

They say that in his prime,

Ere the pruning-knife of Time

Cut him down,

Not a better man was found (10)

By the Crier on his round

Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,

And looks at all he meets

Sad and wan, (15)

And he shakes his feeble head,

That it seems as if he said,

“They are gone.”

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest (20)

In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said— (25)

Poor old lady, she is dead

Long ago—

That he had a Roman nose,

And his cheek was like a rose

In the snow; (30)

But now his nose is thin,

And it rests upon his chin

Like a staff,

And a crook is in his back,

And a melancholy crack (35)

In his laugh.

I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin

At him here;

But the old three-cornered hat, (40)

And the breeches, and all that,

Are so queer!

And if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

In the spring, (45)

Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough

Where I cling.

To Autumn

JOHN KEATS

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, (5)

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease, (10)

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; (15)

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook; (20)

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?