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”

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poetry essay

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