“An Allegory of Poetry” by Auger Lucas
Illuminating yet mysterious, exciting yet elegant: Classical poetry never goes out of style. From the lyrics in people’s favorite songs to Robert Frost’s nature-themed poems to Basho’s haiku to Shakespeare’s sonnets to Li Bai’s Tang Dynasty poems to Homer’s epics, the rhythm is there, the rhyming is usually there too—all that the students are waiting for is a teacher to teach them.
Writing classical poetry is surprisingly easy for students, as you will see below. The first step to teaching it, however, is for you, the teacher, to find a poem or poet, dead or living, who resonates with you:
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Students of any age thrive when they have a well-structured environment with clear boundaries and common sense rules on the one hand and opportunities for wide-open creative engagement on the other hand.
Classical poetry, also known as formal poetry or traditional poetry, is perfect for this. That’s why it was used as the cornerstone of education in past centuries, as well as in different cultures. It can be as simple as counting syllables in the line (like haiku writing) and, optionally, leads on to more challenging and fun techniques such as rhyming or alliteration. For the ambitious students, it could lead to the use of the English language’s natural stresses to form metrical patterns, such as iambic pentameter, as well as more complex ones such as the one in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”
Here are resources for introducing your students to classical poetry:
You may also dive write in to the specific forms:
Haiku
Limerick
Pantoum
Rondeau
Rubaiyat (Persian form)
Sestina
Sonnet
Villanelle
When I look at you What I see in you is me Run baby girl wild and free
leaves nod to the rain and splash of bare feet running an unfurled umbrella a wave breaks offshore white surf…
Summer cicadas Don't think of the short lifespan, Enjoying their life. Summer is changing Her linen dress and flip-flops, -…
Hannah, this is a beautiful image. You have a perfect fragment in your first line and phrase in the next…
When mortality ends, redeemed life begins, as you eloquently put it, "My future debts are paid in full, they say,…