Poetry Response Assignment
“People have read poetry or listened to it or recited it because they liked it, because it gave them enjoyment. But
this is not the whole answer. Poetry in all ages has been regarded as important, not simply as one of several
alternative forms of amusement, as one person might choose bowling, another, chess, and another, poetry. Rather, it
has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life,
something that we are better off for having and without which we are spiritually impoverished.” -- Laurence Perrine
“Everyone who has an emotion and a language knows something about poetry. What he knows may not be much on
an absolute scale, and it may not be organized within him in a useful way, but once he discovers the pleasure of
poetry, he is likely to be surprised to discover how much he always knew without knowing he knew it. He may
discover, somewhat as the character in the French play discovered to his amazement that he had been talking prose
all his life, that he had been living poetry. Poetry, after all, is about life. Anyone who is alive and conscious must have
some information about it.” -- John Ciardi
Students sometimes cringe when they learn that this course begins with poetry. As children most of you loved
poetry, reciting nursery rhymes and chanting limericks. What happened? I don’t have the answer, but one of the
goals for this semester will be to rekindle your enthusiasm for and appreciation of poetry.
We will be approaching poetry two ways. We are studying some poems in class, learning about the tools and
devices poets use in their craft, talking about what a poem means or how it made you feel, or seeking answers to
questions we raised while reading or studying. You might call this our structured or formal study of poetry. But we
are also studying poetry informally through poetry responses.
You will be writing responses to poems from the following list at various points through the semester: twice
weekly during our poetry unit; once weekly for the remainder of the semester. Please look closely at the list of
dates to know when these responses are due. Your first job is to get to know them. To that end, you will read all the
poems from the list at least once every week. Read them at different times, in different places, and in different
moods. You will notice how the poems will reveal themselves to you over the weeks. Although you will respond on
paper to only one poem for each assignment, you want to become acquainted with all the poems on the list.
For each assignment date, you will choose one poem from the list and write a response to that poem. These
responses are to be a minimum of about 200-250 words, (roughly one typed page). Late poetry reactions do not
receive credit. You will need to submit a copy of your response through Turnitin.com, in addition to giving me a
hard copy. The grading is simple and will count as a test in your quarter grade: If you turn in all the responses -and all are ‘good faith’ efforts” -- you get an A. If you are missing one, you get a B, missing two, a C, missing three, a
D, missing four or more, an F.
You may approach this assignment several ways: Sometimes you may write an analysis of the poem, explaining
what is going on in the poem and relate what you think the theme is. You may begin with the theme and elaborate
on that. You might apply the poem to yourself by relating a personal experience. You may write a response on one
line from the poem. You may want to look at it from a political standpoint, an economic standpoint, a feminist
standpoint, or archetypal standpoint. You may want to practice some of the terminology we’re using and see how
diction, or tone, sound, rhyme scheme, or structure (or various other devices) create an effect in the piece. What
you do with the response is up to you as long as you say something. You should try a variety of approaches
throughout, though. Students who explain that they “can not understand the poem no matter how” they tried do
not get credit. You will not like all the poems, but if you choose to write that you dislike a poem because of its
content or style, support that with concrete detail.
Adapted from Skip Nicholson (South Pasadena High School, CA)
and Danny Lawrence (Career Center, Winston-Salem, NC)
Choose one of the following poems for each of the poetry responses. All are found in Perrine’s Sound
and Sense, 12th ed. on the indicated pages. Use a poem once only during the semester. Write on one
poem only for a poetry response.
“The Whipping,” Robert Hayden – p. 12
“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” Dylan Thomas
“The Man He Killed,” Thomas Hardy – p. 26
– p. 249
“A Study of Reading Habits,” Philip Larkin – p. 27
“Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden – p. 344
“Question,” May Swenson – p. 37
“Sadie and Maud,” Gwendolyn Brooks – pp. 348-49
“Pathedy of Manners,” Ellen Kay – p. 45-46
“A Light Exists in Spring,” Emily Dickinson – p. 356
“Naming of Parts,” Henry Reed – pp. 48-49
“Sympathy,” Paul Lawrence Dunbar – pp. 360-61
“Harlem,” Langston Hughes – p. 71
“Birches,” Robert Frost – pp. 364-65
“I taste a liquor never brewed,” Emily Dickinson – p. 82
“Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins,” R.S. Gwynn—
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” Robert Herrick –
pp. 369-70
p. 98
“Follower,” Seamus Heaney – p. 374
“The Writer,” Richard Wilbur – pp. 102-3
“A Work of Artifice,” Marge Piercy – pp. 391-92
“Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost – p. 103
“Mad Girl’s Love Song,” Sylvia Plath – pp. 392-93
“Much Madness is divinest Sense,” Emily Dickinson – p.
“Richard Cory,” Edwin Arlington Robinson – pp. 399-400
114
“”Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” Wallace Stevens – p.
“Out, Out,” Robert Frost – pp. 136-37
407
“The Oxen,” Thomas Hardy – p. 171
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman –
“We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks – p. 190
p. 411
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Robert Frost – p. 196
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” William Butler Yeats – p. 420
Due dates:
QUARTER ONE:
Monday, Aug. 24
Wednesday, Aug. 26
Monday, Aug. 31
Wednesday, Sept. 2
Wednesday, Sept. 9
Wednesday, Sept. 16
Wednesday, Sept. 23
Wednesday, Sept. 30
Wednesday, Oct. 7 (end of first quarter)
QUARTER TWO:
Tuesday, Oct. 13
Tuesday, Oct. 20
Tuesday, Oct. 27
Tuesday, Nov. 3
Tuesday, Nov. 10
Tuesday, Nov. 17
Tuesday, Nov. 24
Tuesday, Dec. 1