Reading Poetry: A Beginner's Welcome

Session 1 — How to Read a Poem Aloud, Part I

Focus: The first and most important skill in reading poetry is also the most overlooked: reading aloud. A poem is a sonic object before it is anything else. This session establishes the foundational practice of the course and introduces the basic physical experience of poetry — what happens in your mouth and ears when you read slowly.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Poetry is older than print. For thousands of years poetry was an oral art, composed and carried in the voice; the printed page is a score for performance, not the performance itself. Reading aloud restores the poem to the medium it was made for.
2. Punctuation governs the pause, not the line ending. The breath should follow the grammar — commas, periods, semicolons — rather than stopping mechanically at the right-hand margin. Mistaking the line break for a full stop is the most common way beginners distort a poem.
3. The last word of every line carries extra weight. Even when a sentence runs on, eye and ear register a faint emphasis where the line ends, so poets place words there deliberately. Noticing those terminal words is a quick way into a poem’s priorities.
4. Sound can be apprehended before sense. You do not need to decode a poem’s meaning to read it well; attending first to its music — rhythm, vowel, consonant — often opens the meaning indirectly. Comprehension can follow the ear rather than lead it.
5. Every poem asks for a second reading. The first pass is for sound and orientation; the second is for sense and pattern. Re-reading is not remedial — it is the basic condition of reading poetry at all.

Reading

• Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — Poetry Foundation
• William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say” — Poetry Foundation
• Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Robert Frost — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and essays placing Frost’s deceptively plain New England voice within American modernism.
• William Carlos Williams — Academy of American Poets — overview of Williams’s everyday-speech aesthetic and his “no ideas but in things” credo.
• Langston Hughes — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of Hughes’s use of vernacular speech and Black musical forms in his verse.

In-Class Practice

We read each poem aloud as a group, then in pairs, then silently. After the third reading, write one sentence: The moment I noticed most in this poem was _____. This stays in your notebook. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. When you read Frost’s poem aloud, what do you notice about its rhythm? Does it feel like a voice you recognize — or a voice unlike any you have heard?
2. “This Is Just to Say” is written as an apology note left on a refrigerator. Does it feel like a poem to you? What, if anything, makes it one?
3. In “Mother to Son,” Hughes writes “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” How does the mother’s way of speaking — her grammar, her diction — shape the meaning of the poem?
4. Which of the three poems changed the most between your first reading and your second? What did you notice the second time that you missed the first?
5. When you read each poem aloud, where did your breath naturally want to pause — and did that match where the lines ended?

Homework

Tonight, find a poem you remember from school — any poem at all. Read it aloud in your apartment three times: once for sound, once following the punctuation, once for sense. Write a sentence or two on how the poem changed across the three readings, and bring your note next week if you wish.

Session 2 — How to Read a Poem Aloud, Part II

Focus: We continue our practice of reading aloud, now paying closer attention to what the line break does — the small pause, the double meaning, the moment of suspension before the sentence continues. We also explore how punctuation (or its absence) shapes the experience of a poem.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The line break is a deliberate choice. Poets decide where each line ends, and that decision is never accidental; it shapes pace, emphasis, and meaning. Learning to read the break as intention is the work of this session.
2. Enjambment generates momentum and surprise. When a sentence runs past the end of a line without stopping, it pulls the reader forward and can spring a small surprise at the start of the next line. The gap between line’s end and sentence’s end becomes expressive space.
3. End-stopped lines create closure and weight. A line that finishes with its grammatical unit feels complete, deliberate, final. The contrast between enjambed and end-stopped lines is one of free verse’s primary instruments.
4. Removing punctuation can disorient productively. e.e. cummings strips away capitalization and stops to make the reader meet language as if for the first time, alert and slightly off balance. Disorientation here is a technique, not a defect.
5. Dialect and vernacular are claims about who may speak. Dunbar’s movement between standard English and African American vernacular is itself an argument about voice and authority in poetry. Form, in other words, carries a politics.

Reading

• John Keats, “To Autumn” — Poetry Foundation
• e.e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” — Poetry Foundation
• Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• John Keats — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and critical introduction to Keats’s odes and his idea of “negative capability.”
• E. E. Cummings — Academy of American Poets — discussion of cummings’s typographic experiment and his disruption of syntax.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar — Poetry Foundation poet page — overview of Dunbar’s dual practice in dialect and standard English and its critical stakes.

In-Class Practice

Take one stanza of Keats’s “To Autumn” and mark the end-stopped lines with a period symbol and the enjambed lines with an arrow. Read it aloud both ways: pausing at every line ending, then following the grammar only. Notice what changes. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Keats’s “To Autumn” is full of enjambment — lines that run into one another without stopping. Read it aloud and feel where the sentence wants to pause versus where the line ends. What does that tension create?
2. cummings writes “anyone lived in a pretty how town / (with up so floating many bells down).” What happens if you try to parse that sentence grammatically? What happens if you don’t try, and just read it for sound?
3. “Sympathy” is a poem about a caged bird — and about the speaker who claims to know what the bird knows. Where in the poem does the metaphor announce itself? Does Dunbar feel like he is speaking about something specific, or something universal, or both?
4. Which of today’s poems felt most comfortable to read aloud, and which felt most difficult? What made the difference?
5. After two sessions of reading aloud: has your relationship to the act of reading a poem changed at all? What do you now do differently?

Homework

Write four lines about any season — now, the one you are in. Try to enjamb at least one line: let the sentence run past the margin. Then read it aloud and note in a sentence what the run-over created that an end-stopped line would not have.

Session 3 — Image & the Senses, Part I

Focus: Poetry does not explain feelings — it renders them in images. This session introduces the Imagist movement and its core principle: that a single, precise, sensory detail can carry more meaning than any amount of explanation.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. An image is a sensory detail, not a decoration. It is something seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled, presented so concretely that the reader experiences it rather than being told about it. The image does the work that abstraction cannot.
2. The image is the meaning. A strong image does not point toward a meaning located elsewhere; the meaning is lodged in the thing itself. To paraphrase the image into a “message” is usually to lose it.
3. Imagism was a deliberate revolt. In the early twentieth century Williams, H.D., and Pound rejected abstraction, ornament, and vagueness in favor of hard, exact presentation. The movement reset what a modern poem could be.
4. “No ideas but in things.” Williams’s dictum insists that thought enters poetry through concrete objects, not the other way around. The way into feeling and idea is the particular thing in front of you.
5. Brevity can hold more than length. A two-line poem, if its image is precisely chosen, can carry more than pages of explanation. Compression is a form of intensity, not a lack of content.

Reading

• William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” — Poetry Foundation
• William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” (opening section) — Poetry Foundation
• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), “Sea Rose” — Poetry Foundation
• Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• A Brief Guide to Imagism — Academy of American Poets — concise introduction to the movement’s principles and its leading figures.
• H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography tracing H.D.’s austere imagist style and her later mythic work.
• Ezra Pound — Academy of American Poets — overview of Pound’s role as theorist and impresario of Imagism.

In-Class Practice

Close your eyes. Think of one object from your childhood home — any object. Write three sentences describing it using only sensory details: no feelings, no explanations, no interpretations. Read what you wrote. Notice: do the details carry feeling without naming it? (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Williams says “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow.” What does depend on it? Does the poem answer that question, or does it leave the question open?
2. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is two lines long: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” What is being compared to what? What makes the comparison work?
3. H.D.’s rose is “harsh,” “marred,” “meager.” Why might a poet choose an imperfect flower? What does that choice say about beauty, or survival, or what we value?
4. “Spring and All” describes a landscape as “They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter.” Is Williams describing plants, or something else?
5. Do you find very short poems more or less satisfying than longer ones? What does a short poem demand of you as a reader?

Homework

Write a “Red Wheelbarrow” of your own: “so much depends / upon / ___.” Choose any object from your life right now, and let only sensory detail appear — no statement of why it matters.

Session 4 — Image & the Senses, Part II

Focus: Images do not only exist in short, spare poems. This session explores how poets use imagery over longer stretches — across a poem that moves through time, through a house, through memory — and how a sustained image can accumulate meaning as a poem progresses.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. An image can be at once personal and universal. A precisely particular detail can anchor a poem in one life while gesturing toward an experience many readers share. The specific is the road to the general, not its opposite.
2. Sustained domestic images can carry unspoken love. Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” builds on cold rooms, cracked hands, and polished shoes; the love in the poem is never named, only shown. Restraint becomes the poem’s emotional engine.
3. Precise observation is itself a discipline. Bishop’s near-painterly attention to objects, animals, and places models how sustained looking becomes meaning. Accuracy of seeing is, for her, a moral and artistic value.
4. A single image can hold contradictory feeling. Roethke’s greenhouse and waltz poems use the natural and domestic world to hold memory, fear, and tenderness at once. Ambiguity is not a flaw to resolve but the truth the poem records.
5. What a poem withholds matters as much as what it states. Noticing the unsaid — the explanation a poet declines to give — is central to reading imagery well. Absence can be as expressive as presence.

Reading

• Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” — Poetry Foundation
• Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish” — Academy of American Poets
• Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Robert Hayden — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Hayden’s formal control and his reticent treatment of memory.
• Elizabeth Bishop — Academy of American Poets — overview of Bishop’s exact observation and her reluctance toward confession.
• Theodore Roethke — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of Roethke’s greenhouse poems and the disputed tone of “My Papa’s Waltz.”

In-Class Practice

Choose one of the three poems. Find the single image in it that feels most precise, most specifically chosen. Write two sentences explaining what that image does — what it carries, why it couldn’t be replaced by another image. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. In Hayden’s poem, the speaker asks: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” What is an “office” of love? Do you recognize this kind of love in your own life?
2. Bishop spends nearly the entire poem describing a fish she has just caught. She names every detail — the “five big hooks / grown firmly in his mouth,” the “medals with their ribbons.” Why? What has she caught besides a fish?
3. “My Papa’s Waltz” is a poem that critics have disagreed about for decades: is it warm, or frightening, or both at once? Read it twice. What do you think? What in the language guides you to that reading?
4. Which of today’s poems stays closest to the physical world, and which reaches furthest beyond it? Is that a distinction that matters?
5. Think of an object or place from your own life that holds a lot of history. What would you have to describe to carry that history into a poem?

Homework

Write a poem about a room you have spent time in. Describe it in sensory detail. Do not explain what the room means to you — let the description do that work — and underline the one image you would keep if you could keep only one.

Session 5 — Voice & Speaker, Part I

Focus: Every poem has a speaker — an “I” in the poem who is not necessarily the poet. This session introduces the concept of the lyric speaker and explores how Dickinson’s various speakers navigate death, grief, nature, and consciousness from unexpected angles.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The speaker is a created figure. Even when a poem sounds like confession, its “I” is a constructed presence chosen by the poet. Separating speaker from poet is the first move of careful reading.
2. The lyric “I” is an invitation. It asks the reader to inhabit a perspective for the length of the poem — identify with me, see as I see. This is what lets a private utterance become a shared one.
3. Dickinson’s speakers stand at thresholds. They speak from the edge of death, the verge of madness, the periphery of nature, which gives them an unusual vantage on ordinary experience. The marginal position is the source of the strangeness.
4. Slant rhyme registers unease. When a rhyme almost works but does not quite, the near-miss makes the reader feel that something in the poem’s world is slightly off. Form enacts feeling rather than merely decorating it.
5. Voice reveals values. What a speaker notices, and what they choose to name, tells us who they are. Attending to attention is a way of reading character.

Reading

• Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death” (Fr479) — Poetry Foundation
• Emily Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died” (Fr591) — Poetry Foundation
• Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Fr1263) — Academy of American Poets
• Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Emily Dickinson — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Dickinson’s compression, slant rhyme, and threshold speakers.
• Emily Dickinson — Academy of American Poets — complementary overview of her manuscripts, publication history, and reception.
• Gwendolyn Brooks — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of Brooks’s craft and her use of a precarious collective “we.”

In-Class Practice

Write three lines from the point of view of an object in your apartment — a chair, a window, a coffee cup. What does it see? What does it know about you that you might not say directly? (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Dickinson’s speaker in “Because I could not stop for Death” describes Death as a gentleman caller with a carriage. How does that tone — polite, almost social — change what the poem is about? What does politeness in the face of death mean?
2. In “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,” the speaker is already dead, narrating the moment of dying. The last thing she notices is a fly. Why a fly? What does that choice do to the idea of a dignified death?
3. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” is itself a poem about how poetry works. What does Dickinson mean by “slant”? Is this a theory of poetry, or a theory of how to live?
4. Brooks said she wanted the “We” in “We Real Cool” to fall at the end of each line so it felt uncertain, even precarious. Read it that way. Do you hear the precariousness she describes?
5. Which of today’s speakers felt most like someone you recognized? Which felt most unlike you — and did that distance make the poem easier or harder to enter?

Homework

Find one more Dickinson poem at the Poetry Foundation (she wrote nearly 1,800; there are many to choose from). Read it twice and write two or three sentences: Who is the speaker? What is their situation? What do they notice that surprises you?

Session 6 — Voice & Speaker, Part II

Focus: The dramatic monologue — a poem spoken entirely by a character who is clearly not the poet — is one of the most powerful forms in the English tradition. This session reads poems in which the speaker reveals themselves, often without intending to, and asks what it means to inhabit a voice we do not share.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. In dramatic monologue the speaker is a character. The poet is invisible but present in every choice of word and emphasis. The form lets a writer build a whole consciousness that is not their own.
2. The unreliable narrator reveals more than he means to. Browning’s Duke in “My Last Duchess” exposes his own cruelty and vanity precisely while trying to appear cultivated. Irony lives in the gap between what the speaker intends and what we perceive.
3. An entire community can be built from monologues. Masters’s Spoon River Anthology gives each inhabitant of a fictional town a posthumous, first-person epitaph, and the book’s meaning arises from the chorus. The collective portrait is greater than any single voice.
4. Poets can dignify the marginal and the failed. Robinson writes about figures of apparent success and hidden failure who are never quite what they appear. The form lets unglamorous lives speak with full seriousness.
5. Language teaches us whom to trust. We distrust some speakers and trust others because of how they speak, not because the poem tells us. Reading well means reading those signals carefully.

Reading

• Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” — Poetry Foundation
• Edgar Lee Masters, “Lucinda Matlock” from Spoon River Anthology — Wikisource
• Edgar Lee Masters, “Richard Bone” from Spoon River Anthology — Wikisource
• Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Robert Browning — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Browning’s perfection of the dramatic monologue.
• Edgar Lee Masters — Poetry Foundation poet page — overview of the Spoon River Anthology and its chorus of small-town epitaphs.
• Edwin Arlington Robinson — Academy of American Poets — account of Robinson’s portraits of failure, irony, and Tilbury Town.

In-Class Practice

Choose any person, living or dead, whom you know or have known. Write six lines in their voice: their first-person statement about their own life. Do not explain or editorialize. Let them speak. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. In “My Last Duchess,” what does the Duke reveal about himself without meaning to? What does Browning want us to see that the Duke cannot see about himself?
2. Lucinda Matlock’s epitaph is exuberant, almost scolding: “It takes life to love Life.” Richard Bone’s is quieter and more troubled. What is each speaker proud of? What does each regret?
3. “Richard Cory” ends with a line that shocks almost every reader. Read it twice. Does the ending change how you read the opening stanzas — the wealth, the grace, the admiration of the townspeople?
4. When we read a dramatic monologue, we are asked to inhabit a voice that may hold values very different from our own. The Duke in Browning’s poem is controlling and violent. Can we — should we — enter such a voice as readers? What do we gain by doing it?
5. Think of someone in your own life — living or dead — whose story has never been told in their own voice. What would they say?

Homework

Finish the dramatic monologue you began in class. Read it back and write one sentence answering: what does this speaker reveal without meaning to?

Session 7 — The Sonnet and Other Closed Forms, Part I

Focus: Form is not a cage — it is a pressure. When a poet works within tight formal constraints, the language is compressed, weighted, and precise. This session introduces the sonnet — the central closed form in English poetry — and the Shakespearean variety in particular.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A sonnet is fourteen lines with a turn. Traditionally in iambic pentameter, it pivots on a volta near or at the end. The form’s brevity forces compression and decision.
2. The Shakespearean sonnet has a distinctive architecture. Three quatrains build an argument and a closing couplet sums up, revises, or undercuts it. The structure is a small machine for thinking.
3. Iambic pentameter mirrors English speech. Five unstressed-stressed pairs (da-DUM da-DUM…) approximate the natural pulse of the language. That is why the meter can sound both heightened and familiar at once.
4. Shakespeare’s sonnets contend with time and mortality. They obsess over aging, beauty’s decay, and art’s power to preserve what life destroys. The poems are arguments against oblivion.
5. The closing couplet lands like a verdict. It often arrives with the force of an argument just won — or with an irony that quietly undermines everything before it. Where the couplet’s weight falls determines the poem’s final meaning.

Reading

• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) — Poetry Foundation
• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”) — Poetry Foundation
• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• William Shakespeare — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on the sonnets’ themes of time, love, and art.
• Poetic Form: Sonnet — Academy of American Poets — concise history of the sonnet’s structure, the volta, and its English and Italian variants.
• Sonnet — Encyclopaedia Britannica — scholarly entry on the form’s origins, prosody, and evolution.

In-Class Practice

We scan one quatrain of Sonnet 18 together: tap the table lightly on each stressed syllable. Feel the pulse. Then try two lines of your own in roughly the same rhythm — any subject. This is an experiment, not an assignment. Nothing you write here is wrong. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. In Sonnet 18, Shakespeare says his beloved’s “eternal summer shall not fade” because the poem preserves them. Is that a gift or a claim? Do you believe a poem can preserve someone?
2. Sonnet 73 uses three extended metaphors for aging: late autumn, twilight, and a dying fire. Which feels most true to you? Which is most surprising? Do any of them feel wrong?
3. Sonnet 29 moves from despair (“I all alone beweep my outcast state”) to sudden joy — triggered by the memory of a person. Where exactly does the turn happen? What causes it?
4. The closing couplet of Sonnet 18 is: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Does that feel triumphant to you, or does it feel like a kind of vanity?
5. All three sonnets address an absent “you.” Does knowing that the “you” is ambiguous — possibly a man, possibly a woman, possibly a patron — change how you read the poems?

Homework

Write 14 lines on any subject that preoccupies you right now. They do not need to rhyme or scan. But put a turn somewhere near line 9, and note in a sentence what the turn does to everything before it.

Session 8 — The Sonnet and Other Closed Forms, Part II

Focus: The sonnet survived into the twentieth century — but under pressure. Modern poets inherited the form and bent it: loosening the meter, replacing perfect rhyme with slant rhyme, turning the subject matter from idealized love toward doubt, war, loss, and desire. This session reads the sonnet in its modern life.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The sonnet lives by being resisted. Modern poets keep the form alive precisely by straining against it; the tension between inherited shape and new content is productive. Tradition becomes useful as something to push against.
2. Frost uses compression to pose unanswerable questions. “Design” turns the sonnet’s tight architecture toward a philosophical dread that has no comfortable resolution. The neat form makes the disturbing question more pointed.
3. Millay reverses the form’s gendered tradition. Writing as an openly desiring woman in a form long spoken by men about women, she makes that reversal itself a statement. The convention is repurposed against its own history.
4. McKay weaponizes formal authority. Bringing the Shakespearean sonnet into the Harlem Renaissance, he uses its dignity and order to deliver an incendiary call to resist racial violence. The propriety of the form amplifies the radicalism of the content.
5. Constraint can produce explosion. A closed form is a box, and what is put under pressure inside a box gains force. Limitation, paradoxically, is a source of intensity.

Reading

• Robert Frost, “Design” — Poetry Foundation
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” — Poetry Foundation
• Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Edna St. Vincent Millay — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Millay’s modern revival of the sonnet and its frank desire.
• Claude McKay — Academy of American Poets — overview of McKay’s Harlem Renaissance sonnets and the politics of his formal choices.
• Robert Frost — Poetry Foundation poet page — criticism placing the dark metaphysics of “Design” within Frost’s formal practice.

In-Class Practice

Take Millay’s final couplet and rewrite it in two different ways — once making it more comforting, once making it harsher. Read all three versions aloud. Notice how the ending changes the entire poem. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Frost’s “Design” asks whether the small, white tableau he describes — a white spider, a white moth, a white flower — was arranged by design or by chance. If by design, what kind of God does that imply? If by chance, what does that imply instead?
2. Millay’s final image is “a tree in winter that cannot remember what it sang.” What has been lost? Is the poem about forgetting lovers, or about forgetting a younger version of oneself, or both?
3. McKay wrote “If We Must Die” in 1919, in the aftermath of the Red Summer — a season of white mob violence against Black Americans across the country. Read the poem knowing that. How does the formal dignity of the sonnet — its iambic pentameter, its rhyme scheme — function as a political act?
4. All three of today’s sonnets end with a couplet that carries enormous weight. Which couplet do you find most powerful? What makes it land the way it does?
5. After two weeks with the sonnet: do you feel that the form’s constraints are enabling — that working within them produces something that couldn’t be produced freely? Or do the constraints feel artificial to you?

Homework

Write your own 14-line poem using any three of the following words in the final couplet: stone, light, remember, door, again. The form is yours to keep or break.

Session 9 — Free Verse and Open Lines, Part I

Focus: If the sonnet represents the formal tradition in English poetry, Whitman represents its great American alternative: a long, open, cataloging line that includes everything — every voice, every body, every blade of grass — and refuses to close. This session spends a full hour with Whitman.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Free verse is chosen form, not absent form. Rather than the lack of rule, it is the decision of form anew for every single line. The freedom is real but never arbitrary.
2. Whitman’s long line is democratic in principle. By refusing to select, exclude, or compress, it makes room for everyone and everything. The shape of the line embodies a politics of inclusion.
3. The catalog is Whitman’s central device. Accumulation through repetition produces a feeling of abundance and overflow, a world too large for one perspective. The list becomes an argument about plenitude.
4. Whitman’s “I” is personal and universal at once. It is his own voice and a voice he offers to every reader — what I assume you shall assume. The first person becomes a shared possession rather than a private one.
5. “Song of Myself” moves from identity to dispersal. It begins with a single self and ends with that self dissolving into grass, air, and the future reader. The arc enacts the poem’s belief that the self is continuous with everything.

Reading

• Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Section 1 — Poetry Foundation
• Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Section 6 (“A child said, What is the grass?”) — Poetry Foundation
• Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing” — Poetry Foundation
• Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Section 52 (final section) — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Walt Whitman — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Leaves of Grass, the long line, and Whitman’s democratic vision.
• Walt Whitman — Academy of American Poets — complementary overview of Whitman’s revisions and his influence on free verse.
• Walt Whitman — Encyclopaedia Britannica — scholarly entry on Whitman’s life, work, and place in American letters.

In-Class Practice

Write a catalog — a list of at least eight items, people, places, or moments from your life in this city. Use Whitman’s “I” freely. Let each item take a line. Do not explain or interpret. Just list. Read it aloud when finished. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Whitman opens “Song of Myself” with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Is that arrogance? Or is it something more generous than it first sounds?
2. In Section 6, a child asks “What is the grass?” and Whitman gives seven or eight different answers. Why doesn’t he give just one? What does the multiplicity of answers tell us about the kind of poem this is?
3. “I Hear America Singing” is a catalog of workers and their songs. Each person sings “what belongs to him or her and to no one else.” What does that phrase mean? Is it a statement about individuality, or privacy, or pride?
4. The final section of “Song of Myself” ends: “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Who is Whitman waiting for? Does the poem feel as if it is speaking to you, personally?
5. Does Whitman’s optimism — his insistence that everything is acceptable and everything belongs — feel earned to you, or does it feel like it asks too little of the world?

Homework

Add four more lines to the catalog you wrote in class tonight — four more things from your life in this city that belong in the poem. Read the whole thing aloud once more before you set it down.

Session 10 — Free Verse and Open Lines, Part II

Focus: Whitman’s long line was an inheritance — and every poet who came after him either took it up or argued with it. This session traces that inheritance through Ginsberg’s mid-century exuberance, Oliver’s quiet naturalism, and Merwin’s austere, unpunctuated meditation.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Ginsberg claimed Whitman as a direct ancestor. He even wrote a poem in which he wanders a supermarket with Whitman’s ghost, making the inheritance explicit. Influence here is consciously dramatized rather than hidden.
2. Oliver’s free verse is short-lined and precise. Closer to the Imagists than to Whitman in line, she nonetheless shares his conviction that paying attention is a spiritual act. Quiet observation becomes a form of devotion.
3. Merwin abandoned punctuation entirely. His later poems use no commas, periods, or apostrophes, producing a dreamlike, continuous, uninterrupted flow. The absence of stops is itself the poem’s atmosphere.
4. In free verse the line break does the work of punctuation — and more. Because a break can suspend a phrase in two meanings at once, it generates ambiguity that prose cannot. The white space at the line’s end becomes an instrument.
5. Free verse spans intimacy and prophecy. It can be whispered or declaimed, compressed or expansive; its only rule is that every choice be deliberate. The freedom is defined by responsibility for each decision.

Reading

• Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” — Poetry Foundation
• Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” — Academy of American Poets
• W.S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Allen Ginsberg — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Ginsberg’s Whitmanic line and his place in the Beat movement.
• Mary Oliver — Academy of American Poets — overview of Oliver’s attention to the natural world and her plainspoken devotional mode.
• W. S. Merwin — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of Merwin’s unpunctuated later style and its visionary effect.

In-Class Practice

Write six lines of free verse about something you saw this week — anything: on the street, in the building, out a window. Break the lines wherever the meaning wants to pause, not where a sentence ends. Read it aloud and see if the line breaks feel right or need adjusting. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Ginsberg walks through a supermarket at night, thinking of Whitman. What is he saying about America in 1955? About loneliness? About what poetry is for?
2. Oliver tells you: “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” Who does she think needs to hear this? Do you feel she is talking to you?
3. Merwin’s “For the Anniversary of My Death” begins: “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me.” He doesn’t know which day he will die, so every day might be the anniversary. How does removing punctuation add to the dreamlike quality of that idea?
4. Of Whitman, Ginsberg, Oliver, and Merwin — four poets who all work in some form of free verse — which voice feels most distinctive to you? What makes you recognize it as that poet’s, and not another’s?
5. “Wild Geese” ends: “whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination.” Does that feel true to you? Does it feel earned?

Homework

Reread “Wild Geese” before you sleep tonight. Write one sentence beginning: “The thing this poem gives me permission to do is ___.” Then write three lines of your own that take that permission.

Session 11 — Metaphor and Figure, Part I

Focus: The metaphor is the engine of poetry. This session examines how poets use comparison — declared and undeclared, brief and extended — to say what literal language cannot reach. We begin with two of the most celebrated examples in the tradition.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A metaphor asserts identity between unlike things. It says outright that X is Y, collapsing two separate realms into one. The leap, not the resemblance, is what makes it powerful.
2. A simile keeps the safety net. By using “like” or “as,” it announces the comparison and holds the two terms slightly apart. That hedging produces a different, often gentler, effect than metaphor’s bold equation.
3. The extended conceit pursues one comparison rigorously. A conceit develops a single figure through an entire poem, refining it with increasing logic and surprise. Sustaining a metaphor tests and deepens it.
4. Dickinson builds an argument on a single figure. “Hope is the thing with feathers” develops every detail of the poem out of the equation of hope with a bird. The whole emotional case rests on one comparison carried through.
5. Donne’s compass is the tradition’s great conceit. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” likens two souls to the legs of a drawing compass, perhaps the most logically developed metaphor in English. It shows how an absurd-seeming comparison can become irrefutable.

Reading

• Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers” (Fr254) — Poetry Foundation
• John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” — Poetry Foundation
• Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• John Donne — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on the metaphysical conceit and Donne’s argumentative figures.
• Metaphor — Academy of American Poets glossary — concise definition distinguishing metaphor, simile, and conceit.
• Robert Burns — Encyclopaedia Britannica — scholarly entry on Burns’s songs, simile, and Scots idiom.

In-Class Practice

Complete two sentences without thinking too hard: “Grief is .” “Joy is .” Now write three lines building one of them into a small poem. The emotion cannot be named in the poem — only the thing you compared it to may appear. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Dickinson says hope “sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all.” What kind of hope is this? Is it comforting? Is it maddening? Is it both?
2. Donne compares two souls to the legs of a compass — one fixed, one moving, but joined at the top and always returning. It sounds absurd at first. Does it work? What makes an unlikely comparison succeed?
3. Burns’s poem is all simile: “My love is like a red, red rose.” He keeps saying “like.” Dickinson and Donne say “is.” What difference does that make? What does the simile’s hedging accomplish that a metaphor would not?
4. Which of today’s comparisons felt most surprising — in a way that still worked? Which felt most natural — almost too easy?
5. We often use metaphor in daily speech without noticing: “the heart of the matter,” “a sharp mind,” “broken promise.” Think of three metaphors you use regularly. What do they reveal about how you think?

Homework

Choose an emotion you have been carrying this week. Find a physical object or natural phenomenon that resembles it. Write four lines. Do not name the emotion anywhere in the poem.

Session 12 — Metaphor and Figure, Part II

Focus: Metaphor takes many shapes. This session explores three further varieties — personification, apostrophe, and the extended sustained image — through three poets whose figuration is among the most distinctive in the twentieth century.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Personification grants human qualities to nonhuman things. When a poem says a mirror “meditates,” it asks us to reconsider what reflection itself might be. The device is a way of thinking, not just a flourish.
2. Apostrophe addresses the absent or the silent. Speaking to someone dead, distant, or unable to hear insists on connection across impossibility. The gesture is a claim that language can bridge what reality cannot.
3. Plath’s figurative leaps can feel violent. Her dense personifications force familiar things to appear strange, even disturbing, jolting the reader into new sight. The shock is the point of the figure.
4. Neruda’s odes lavish affection on the ordinary. By personifying an onion, a pair of socks, a tomato, he makes the mundane suddenly luminous. Extravagant praise of small things becomes a way of seeing the world anew.
5. Hughes’s figures are rooted in collective history. The river in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” stands for ancestry, memory, and the endurance of a people. His figurative language carries cultural and emotional specificity, not abstraction.

Reading

• Sylvia Plath, “Mirror” — Poetry Foundation
• Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Socks” — Academy of American Poets
• Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Sylvia Plath — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Plath’s startling figuration and confessional intensity.
• Pablo Neruda — Academy of American Poets — overview of Neruda’s odes to common things and his exuberant personification.
• Langston Hughes — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of Hughes’s early masterpiece and its figures of ancestry and memory.

In-Class Practice

Write four lines in the voice of an inanimate object in this building — the elevator, the mailroom, the lobby door. What has it witnessed? What does it want? What does it know about us? (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. In Plath’s “Mirror,” the mirror speaks: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.” What does it mean for a mirror to be a speaker? What can an object say that a person cannot?
2. The mirror ends: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day.” What has the woman lost? What does it mean to drown a version of yourself?
3. Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks” is funny — and then it becomes something else. He almost “put them away / like schoolboys / or like literary critics.” What is being satirized? What is being celebrated?
4. Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at seventeen, on a train crossing the Mississippi. He connects himself to the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile. What is the argument of the poem? What does the river represent that only a river can represent?
5. Apostrophe — speaking to an absent or nonhuman entity — feels strange if we think about it literally. But poetry normalizes it. Can you think of moments in your own life when you have spoken to something that couldn’t answer?

Homework

Write an ode — a poem of praise — for something ordinary: a coffee maker, a good coat, a bus route you know well. Let the praise be extravagant, and personify the object at least once.

Session 13 — Place and the American Voice

Focus: American poetry is inseparably tied to American place and the question of who gets to belong to that place. This session reads poems that locate themselves in this country — and ask, with varying degrees of urgency, what it means to claim it.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” is a democratic catalog. Each working person carries a distinct song, and the poem’s inclusiveness is its argument. The list form again asserts that everyone belongs.
2. Hughes answers Whitman directly and by name. Across more than seventy years, I, too, sing America functions as correction, demand, and claim. The later poet completes and contests the earlier one’s vision.
3. Poetry of place grounds the abstract in the particular. A city, a street corner, a river, a regional season gives a poem its specific gravity. Belonging is made concrete through named things.
4. Who gets to say “I” is a running question of the tradition. The matter of who is heard, and as whose voice, runs through American poetry from Whitman onward. Inclusion is contested, not given.
5. Our own city is a subject for poetry. Philadelphia is a place we live in; it has a poetry, some written, some not yet. The lesson invites the room to see itself as material.

Reading

• Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing” — Poetry Foundation
• Langston Hughes, “I, Too” — Poetry Foundation
• Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred?”) — Poetry Foundation
• Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York” — Poetry Foundation (or search title at poetryfoundation.org)

Critical Reception

• Langston Hughes — Academy of American Poets — overview of Hughes’s answer to Whitman and his vision of a fuller America.
• Walt Whitman — Poetry Foundation poet page — criticism on Whitman’s democratic catalog and its omissions.
• Claude McKay — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of McKay’s poems of exile, migration, and homesickness.

In-Class Practice

Write the opening three lines of a poem set in a specific place you know in Philadelphia. Name the place. Name one thing you see there that no one else might think to mention. Do not explain why it matters. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Whitman lists carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, wood-cutters, and a mother singing while she sews. Who is missing from his list? Does that absence matter, or is the poem still generous in its vision?
2. Hughes says “I, too, am America.” What does it cost a person to make that claim in 1926 — the year the poem was written? What does it cost to make that claim now?
3. “Harlem” asks: “What happens to a dream deferred?” and offers six figurative answers without choosing between them. Why doesn’t Hughes answer his own question directly? What does that formal evasion tell us?
4. McKay’s speaker, in “The Tropics in New York,” sees tropical fruit in a New York shop window and is suddenly undone by homesickness. What is the poem saying about immigration, displacement, and what we carry with us?
5. Think about this building, this block, this city. If you were to write a poem beginning “I, too, am Philadelphia” — what would the next line be?

Homework

Finish the poem you started in class, or write a new one set anywhere in this city. Name at least one specific place and one specific thing you have actually seen there. Bring it next week if you want to share it.

Session 14 — Poetry of Witness

Focus: Some poems are written in direct confrontation with what is difficult to see and say — violence, injustice, grief, war, loss. This session reads poets who refuse to look away, and asks what poetry can do that other forms of language cannot when the subject is suffering.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Poetry of witness records what might go unseen. The phrase names poems that bear direct testimony to historical or personal experience otherwise lost to silence. Such poems insist that something happened and must be kept.
2. The witness’s obligation is precision. The witness is not neutral, but the task is exactness: to name what occurred, where, and how it felt, as nearly as language allows. Accuracy is the form the witness’s responsibility takes.
3. Brooks writes her community from the inside. She renders Black life in Chicago with tenderness and moral exactitude, as a neighbor rather than a sociologist. Intimacy, not distance, is the source of her authority.
4. Form can hold what history flattens. Hayden and Komunyakaa each witness an American conflict — domestic and military — and use the sonnet and the lyric to keep what abstraction would erase. Compression becomes a way of honoring the particular.
5. A witness poem trusts the reader with feeling. It does not dictate an emotional response; it supplies clarity and lets the reader bring their own feeling. The poem provides the seeing; the response is left free.

Reading

• Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Mother” — Poetry Foundation
• Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage” (opening section) — Academy of American Poets
• Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Gwendolyn Brooks — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on Brooks’s witness to Black Chicago and her formal range.
• Yusef Komunyakaa — Academy of American Poets — overview of Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poems and his lyric of memory and race.
• Robert Hayden — Poetry Foundation poet page — account of “Middle Passage” and Hayden’s documentary poetics of history.

In-Class Practice

Write four lines about something you have witnessed — something you saw, in your lifetime, that you feel should be recorded. It does not have to be a public event. It can be small and private. The only requirement is that it happened and that you were there. (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Brooks’s “The Mother” is spoken by a woman addressing her aborted children directly. It is one of the most controversial poems in the American canon. What does it feel like to read it? What is Brooks refusing to do that another poet might do in this subject’s place?
2. Hayden’s “Middle Passage” reconstructs the transatlantic slave trade from multiple voices and historical documents. The opening lines — “Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy” — are the names of slave ships. What does it mean to name them? What does naming do?
3. In Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” the speaker stands at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He sees his own reflection in the black wall — his face among the names of the dead. The poem ends: “a white vet’s image floats / closer to me, then his pale eyes / look through mine. I’m a window.” What does it mean to be a window?
4. All three of today’s poems address an American wound. Do they ask anything of the reader? Do they offer comfort? Or is comfort not the point?
5. Is there a difference between a poem that witnesses suffering and a poem that exploits it? What does that difference look like on the page?

Homework

Return to the four lines you wrote in class and add four more. You are a witness. Ask yourself what else needs to be said — and say it as precisely as you can.

Session 15 — Writing Our Own

Focus: In this session, we write. Everything we have read and discussed over fourteen weeks comes to bear on the single act of putting words on a page in your own voice. This session is not a workshop — no one’s work is criticized. It is a studio: a room where writing happens.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Reading was preparation for writing. Fourteen weeks of careful reading are genuine, if imperfect, preparation for speaking in your own voice. You write with everything you have absorbed, whether or not you can name it.
2. A first draft is a discovery, not a finished poem. You write to find out what you know, not to transcribe what you already knew. The draft is an instrument of thought.
3. An honest poem cannot be embarrassing. There is no such thing as an embarrassing poem written honestly; sincerity disarms the fear of judgment. Honesty is the only standard that matters tonight.
4. Revision is the work, not a sign of failure. Every poet we have read this term revised, often many times; rewriting is where poems are actually made. To revise is to take your own draft seriously.
5. The prompts are invitations, not requirements. Write whatever is pressing on you right now, with or without the prompts. The aim is to begin, in your own voice, tonight.

Reading

• Revisit any one poem from the previous fourteen sessions that you would like to use as a model tonight — choose freely from the All Course Readings list below.
• Optional, not assigned: James F. Mulhern, “The Guard” — authorjamesmulhern.com — offered only as one working writer’s finished poem, for those curious about process.

Critical Reception

• How to Read a Poem — Academy of American Poets — practical essay on reading closely, useful as a mirror for one’s own drafting.
• A Brief Guide to Revising Poetry — Poetry Foundation: Learning resources — curated guides and essays on craft, drafting, and revision from working poets.

A Working Poet’s Process — 15 Minutes Before We Draft

Why Use My Own Practice This Week? Let me be plain about why I am doing this. It is not because my poems belong in the company we have kept. They do not. For fourteen weeks we have sat with the writers whose work is the canon — Dickinson, Whitman, Hopkins, Frost, Williams, Hughes, Brooks, Bishop, and the rest — and nothing I have written stands beside them. But before you draft your own poems tonight, there is one thing a finished poem on the page cannot teach you: how the making actually goes. The false starts, the long notebook, the reading aloud. For that, it helps to hear from a working writer in the room. That is the only reason I am offering my own practice — the same reason we lean on the working writer in our Revision Workshop. It is a teaching resource, not a curriculum.

How I Actually Work So here is how it goes for me, honestly. I keep a notebook, and most poems begin there — and most of them stay there, which is exactly as it should be. I read everything aloud. Every draft, every time. The ear catches what the eye forgives. When I am drafting, I follow the line, not the idea; the line tells me where the poem wants to go before I do, and I have learned to trust it more than my plans. I am suspicious of my first three drafts — they are usually me clearing my throat. The fourth draft is where the real poem tends to start. And then I let a poem sit, sometimes for weeks, before I decide whether it lives. Time is a more honest reader than I am on the night I wrote it. None of this is a method to copy. It is just one writer’s way, offered so you can see that the work is work.

If you want to see one of these in finished form, my poem “The Guard” is available at authorjamesmulhern.com. It is not assigned. It is not the point. The point is what you write in the next sixty minutes.

In-Class Practice

Prompts for In-Class Composition. Choose one — or ignore all of them and write what you need to write:

• Write a poem about one room you have lived in. Describe it in sensory detail. Do not explain what it meant to you.
• Write a poem in the voice of someone — living or dead — you have not spoken to in too long.
• Write a poem that begins with the first weather you can remember.
• Write a poem called “This Is Just to Say” — a note of apology, gratitude, or admission.
• Write a catalog of eight things you love about this city, or about one person you know.
• Write a poem in which one object stands in for a feeling you cannot name directly.
• Write a witness poem: four to eight lines about something you have seen.

What Happens with This. You write for twenty minutes. What you write belongs entirely to you. No one will read it unless you choose to share it. It will not be collected. It will not be seen by me or by anyone in the room unless you decide otherwise.

After Writing: Optional Sharing. After the twenty minutes, anyone who wishes to read what they wrote is welcome to do so. You may also read any poem you love — by any poet we have read this semester, or any poem from anywhere — in lieu of your own writing. Applause is always appropriate. Silence is also appropriate. Both mean the same thing.

Discussion Questions

1. What surprised you about what came out when you wrote tonight?
2. Did you reach for any of the techniques we’ve worked with — image, voice, metaphor, the line break? Did they help?
3. Is there a line or an image in what you wrote that you’d like to keep? What makes it the line you’d keep?
4. Which poet from the past fourteen weeks did you find yourself writing toward — and why that one?
5. What does your draft teach you that you did not know before you started writing it?

Homework

Revise. Take any draft from tonight — or from any homework activity over the past fourteen sessions — and read it once more. Change one word. Then change another. Let it sit overnight, read it aloud the next morning, and notice what revision does.

Session 16 — Reading-Aloud Celebration

Focus: Our final session is a celebration. We have read together for sixteen weeks. We have read Frost and Dickinson, Whitman and Hughes, Brooks and Komunyakaa and Plath and Donne. We have read poems aloud and written our own. Tonight we gather to share what we have found, to read what matters to us, and to close well.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The course has built a shared library. Over sixteen weeks we have read across centuries, forms, and traditions, and that common ground is now ours. Tonight we draw on everything we have gathered.
2. Reading aloud is the course’s first and last act. We began by learning to read poems aloud, and we end by doing it for one another. The skill that opened the term also closes it.
3. Sharing is voluntary and equal. Anyone may read; no one must. Coming and listening is itself a full form of participation. The room makes room for every degree of involvement.
4. A poem can come from anywhere. Tonight’s readings may be your own work, a poet from our syllabus, a long-loved poem, or a passage of prose that reads like poetry. The boundaries of “the canon” loosen by design.
5. The poems go home with us. What we carry out of this room — a line in the pocket, a poem in the memory — is the real outcome of the course. Reading does not end when the sessions do.

Reading

• Bring one poem to read aloud: your own work from these sixteen weeks, any poet from our All Course Readings, or a poem from anywhere you have loved.
• Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” — Academy of American Poets — offered as one candidate for our closing poem.

Critical Reception

• Wisława Szymborska — Poetry Foundation poet page — biography and criticism on the Nobel laureate’s plainspoken irony and moral clarity.
• How to Read a Poem — Academy of American Poets — a closing reflection on the reading practices we have built all term.

In-Class Practice

The Reading-Aloud Celebration. Anyone who wishes to read is welcome. You may read:

• A poem you wrote over the course of these sixteen weeks
• A poem by any poet we have read this semester that you want to share with the room
• A poem from anywhere — by any poet, from any tradition, in any era — that you have loved for a long time or discovered recently
• A passage of prose that, to you, reads like poetry

No one is required to read. Coming and listening is its own kind of participation. We then close together with a poem chosen by the group. One candidate, which I offer as a possibility:

“After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all.”

— Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” — Academy of American Poets

Discussion Questions

1. What poem from the past sixteen weeks has stayed with you most? Why?
2. Did any poem change your mind about something — your own life, your city, a feeling you thought you understood?
3. What is the most useful thing you learned about how to read?
4. What would you read next?
5. If you were to recommend one poem from this course to a neighbor who never came, which would it be — and what would you say about it?

Homework

Go home with a poem in your pocket. Read it aloud to someone, or to no one, or to yourself. Write its title inside the front of a notebook, and come back to it in a year to see if it sounds different. It will.