American Literature PLC: The Poetry of American Authors
Grades: 9-10
Overarching EQs:
1. What role do American authors play in
creating/capturing/perpetuating/defining/critiquing/changing American identity?
Day 2
Objectives:
1. Students will understand a step-by-step method for reading poetry for meaning.
2. Students will be able to define certain poetry terminology.
Day 3
Objectives:
1. Students will use a step-by-step method for reading poetry to read a Robert Frost poem for
meaning.
Day 4
Objectives:
1.
Resources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1964/02/poetry-and-power/306325/ - JFK speech
honoring Robert Frost, an “artist and an American.”
American Literature Anthologies
http://www.ketzle.com/frost/ - All Frost poems and additional info can be found here
Into My Own
The Road Not Taken
The Mending Wall
The Wood Pile
On a Tree Fallen Across the Road (To Hear Us Talk)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Canis Major
Sand Dunes
Hyla Brook
Birches
On Going Unnoticed
Once by the Pacific
F-Cat’s steps to reading a poem
Possible later/transitional poems:
I, Too, Sing America, Langston Hughes
The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes
Mother to Son, Langston Hughes
We Real Cool, Gwendolyn Brooks
Harlem Shadows, Claude McKay
Spring in New Hampshire, Claude McKay
-What role does American literature play in creating/ representing/ perpetuating/ critiquing/
defining/ changing American identity? How does it change over time and how do we know?
-Robert Frost has often been referred to as “America’s Poet.” Why do you suppose that is? Is this
distinction still appropriate?
-His poetry certainly spoke to/of an American people and landscape that was emblematic
of the era during which he wrote. How did the poetry of America change to suit the
people and landscape of the Harlem renaissance? Of today?
-Students will define poetic devices at work in Frost and identify themes in poetry by analyzing
said devices
-“…the values he presented in his poems were derived from a type of community or society that
was very different from their [students’] own: one that was rural, fearful of change, distrustful of
technology, proud of craftsmanship, and deeply committed to privacy and self-reliance.”
-http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/frost.html
-language, tone, message/meaning, structure (suitable sequence; language is the first thing you’ll
come across, betrays tone, the combination of which can illuminate the poem’s meaning, which
may be further involved with the poem’s structure)
-Picking out literary devices, reading for meaning, and reading with context in mind.
-Objectives:
1. Analyze Poetry for literary devices at work, meaning, context, and subtext
2. Analyze for common themes relevant to American identity
-F-Cat’s steps to reading a poem:
1. Read it
2. Examine words and define as necessary
3. Hypothesize meaning
4. What does the title mean?
5. Re-read
6. “Put your fork down”—don’t breeze through it, I assume. Ponder meaning; digest.
-individuality vs. community in American identity in American literature
-is it fundamentally more American to be self-made or a product of community?
-look at the writing of certain communities and how it reflects the experience of the author as a
part of the community (and you could do anything with this, from Harlem Renaissance to
Nebraska poets).
-with individualism you have the aforementioned work of the transcendentalists (Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, maybe even Dickinson if you want to break up the boys’ club).
-focus on the work of American poets who speak to a particular side of the
individualism/community continuum.