- Literary Home of Linda Sue Grimes
- presents
- Classic Poetry
- for students who hate poetry
Classic Poetry For Students Who Hate Poetry is here to offer assistance in the study of poetry.
Linda Sue Grimes, your Classic Poetry Aide, taught English composition focusing on poetry at Ball State University for fifteen years. She discovered that students are often frustrated when confronting the study of poetry. If you are having difficulty with your study of poetry, you should first discuss the problem with your professor. This site is not intended to replace your professor's instruction but to offer additional assistance.
Your Classic Poetry Aide is in the process of writing thorough analyses of the poems about which she is most often asked. Her essays may help you focus your thinking about the poems you are studying. The essays are not intended to offer the last word or everything that can be said about the poems. Although your Classic Poetry Aide does research on each poem, what she writes is ultimately her own interpretation. She offers her analyses to help you form your own interpretations.
Students are welcome to cite any of the poetry analyses with proper attribution to Classic Poetry for Student Who Hate Poetry! See "Citing Web Sites" below.
- How to Read a Poem
- This essay corrects some of the misunderstandings that limit the unsophisticated reader's ability to appreciate poetry.
- Writing Exercise
- This exercise features an essay about W. B. Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli" and an evaluation of the essay.
- Suggestions for Writing Essays about Poems
- Eleven topics you can write about with explanations that help get you started thinking about poems.
- Analyses of Poems by your Classic Poetry Aide
- Matthew Arnold: "Dover Beach"
- W. H. Auden: "Musée des Beaux Arts" plus William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
- Charles Bernstein: "The Ballad of the Girlie Man"
- William Blake: Scansion of Blake’s “The Garden of Love,” "A Poison Tree," "The Schoolboy"
- Eavan Boland: “It’s a Woman’s World”
- Sterling A. Brown: "Southern Cop"
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Patience Taught by Nature,"
- Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess"
- William Cullen Bryant: "The Yellow Violet," "To a Waterfowl," "The Murdered Traveller"
- Lucille Clifton: "homage to my hips"
- Frances Cornford: “Childhood”
- E. E. Cummings: "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”
- Emily Dickinson: "A Bird came down the Walk," "Because I would not stop for Death," “The Brain is wider than the sky,”
- "I know a place where Summer strives," “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,” "There is a certain Slant of light," "Like Brooms of Steel," "’Twas just this time, last year, I died," "It sifts from leaden sieves," "I like to see it lap the miles"
- T. S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night,"
- Carolyn Forché: "Poem for Maya"
- Robert Frost: "Bereft," "The Oven Bird," “The Road Not Taken,” "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "War Thoughts at Home," "Mending Wall," "Birches," "The Witch of Coös," "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
- Dana Gioia: "Words"
- Louise Glück: "The Pond"
- Barbara Guest: "A Way of Being"
- Robert Hayden: "Those Winter Sundays"
- Langston Hughes: “A Dream Deferred," "Goodbye, Christ,” "Mother to Son," "Theme for English B"
- A. E. Housman: “Loveliest of Trees,” “To an Athlete Dying Young”
- John Keats: “In a drear-nighted December,” "Ode to Autumn"
- Emma Lazarus: "The New Colossus"
- Amy Lowell: "Penumbra," "Fireworks"
- Edna St. Vincent Millay: "Renascence"
- Marianne Moore: "Poetry"
- Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est"
- Linda Pastan: “Marks”
- Sylvia Plath: "Morning Song," "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus" (editor's choice on Suite101.com)
- James Whitcomb Riley: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole"
- E. A. Robinson's "Richard Cory"
- Theodore Roethke: “My Papa’s Waltz” Misreading Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”
- Anne Sexton: "Courage"
- William Stafford: "Traveling through the Dark"
- Rabindranath Tagore: "Gitanjali," "Where the mind is without fear”
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “The Eagle”
- Dylan Thomas: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” "Fern Hill"
- John Greenleaf Whittier: "The Barefoot Boy," "Snow-Bound," "The Pumpkin"
- Walt Whitman: "I Hear America Singing," "Reconciliation"
- Richard Wilbur: "A Late Aubade"
- William Carlos Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow"
- William Wordsworth: "Ode to Duty," "The world is too much with us"
- Elinor Wylie: "The Puritan "
- W. B. Yeats: "Easter, 1916," “Lapis Lazuli,” "The Second Coming"
- Commentaries on Shakespeare Sonnets: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
Citing Web Sites
MLA style for this site:
Grimes, Linda Sue. ["Name of page you are citing."] Classic Poetry for Students Who Hate Poetry! [date of your visit.] <http://stonegulch.com/classicpoetry.html>.
Please note: Remove the brackets [ ] after filling in the appropriate information
APA Style Chicago Style Other styles
Other sites maintained by your Classic Poetry Aide:
- Poetry at Suite101.com
- Articles about poets and poetry, literary movements. Also features a blog, updating current news about poetry, poets, criticism, and other poetry scholarship.
- Republican Party at BellaOnline.com
- Articles about the Republican Party, campaign 2008, and issues that face the party.
- Books by your Classic Poetry Aide:
- Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith
- Jiggery Jee's Eden Valley Stories
- Thank you for visiting Classic Poetry
- To get answers to questions about poetry, please visit Classic Poetry Aide at AllExperts
- last updated April 1, 2008