Chapter 15: Understanding Poetry, English homework help
Carefully read the following sections and poetry titles from Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing.
Chapter 15: Understanding Poetry
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Origins of Modern Poetry”, “Defining Poetry”, “Recognizing Kinds of Poetry”
- Pamela Spiro Wagner, “How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual”
- William Shakespeare, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”
- E.E. Cummings, “l(a”
Chapter 16: Voice
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “The Speaker in the Poem”, “The Tone of the Poem”, “Irony”
- Langston Hughes, “Negro”
- Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
- Thomas Hardy, “The Man He Killed”
- Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
- Agha Shahid Ali, “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ “
Chapter 17: Word Choice, Word Order
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Word Choice”, “Levels of Diction”, “Word Order”
- Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
- Adrienne Rich, “Living in Sin”
- Margaret Atwood, “The City Planners”
- Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”
- Edmund Spenser, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand”
- E.E. Cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”
Chapter 18: Imagery
- Jane Flanders, “Cloud Painter”
- Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
- William Carlos Williams, “Red Wheelbarrow”
- Gary Snyder, “Some Good Things to Be Said for the Iron Age”
Chapter 19: Figures of Speech
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Simile, Metaphor, and Personification”, “Hyperbole and Understatement”, “Metonymy and Synecdoche“, “Apostrophe”
- Langston Hughes, “Harlem”
- Audre Lorde, “Rooming Houses are old Women”
- Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
- Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
- Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
- Richard Lovelace, “To Lucasta Going to the Wars”
- Nancy Mercado, “Going to Work”
Chapter 20: Sound
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Rhythm”, “Meter”, “Alliteration and Assonance”
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “Sadie and Maud”
- Emily Dickinson, “I like to see it lap the Miles—”
- Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”
- Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
- Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky“
Chapter 21: Form
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Form,” “Closed Form”, “The Sestina“, “The Villanelle“, “The Epigram”, “Haiku”, “Open Form”
- John Keats, “On the Sonnet”
- William Shakespeare, “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes”
- Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina“
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “What Is an Epigram?”
- Matsuo Bashō, “Four Haiku”
- Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”
Chapter 22: Symbol, Allegory, Allusion, Myth
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Symbol”, “Allegory”, “Allusion”, “Myth”
- Robert Frost, “For Once, Then, Something”
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
- Christina Rossetti, “Uphill”
- Carl Dennis, “At the Border”
- William Meredith, “Dreams of Suicide”
- Billy Collins, “Aristotle”
- Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel”
- W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
Chapter 23: Discovering Themes in Poetry
- Kirzner & Mandell
- “Poems about Parents”, “Poems about Nature”, “Poems about Love”, “Poems about War”
- Seamus Heaney, “Digging”
- Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”
- Carl Sandburg, “Fog”
- Jehanne Dubrow, “Before the Deployment”
- Dorothy Parker, “General Review of the Sex Situation”
- Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
- Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning”
Chapter 24: Poetry for Further Reading
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “Medgar Evers“
- Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”
- Louise Erdrich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”
- Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B”
- Linda Pastan, “Ethics”
- Cynthia Rylant, “God Went to Beauty School”
write essay 750-1000 words
poetry essay
You should use these terms and concepts in your essays (attached)

