AP Poetry Project



AP Poetry Project

For our next project we will step into the world of poetry; we will learn about American and British poets who have undoubtedly shaped the world we live in, one poem at a time.

Part I:

Each student will select a poet to research and present. Students will research biographical information, which includes but is not limited to:

• Full name (as well as any pen names used).

• Place and date of birth.

• Where the poet grew up (and what might have impacted his work as a result of his upbringing).

• What made this poet want to write poetry?

• What movement (or schools of poetry) was s/he involved with? (Check your AP review book for the major schools/movements.)

• Why is this poet famous?

• What are the poet’s most important pieces?

• Was s/he friends with other poets (or in some way influenced by other poets)?

• Was s/he famous during his/her lifetime?

• Anything else the researcher (you!) find significant.

This section is to be one page typed (no more than one page). Yes, this section can be a list (but no, you may not use Wikipedia—go directly to the poet’s website[s]). BE SURE TO CITE ALL WORK!!

Part II:

• Find and read a collection of the poet’s work.

• Include at least seven poems for the class to read on the day of your presentation (yes, seven different poems), making sure you focus on the themes (and other literary terminology) most significant in this poet’s work.

• For one of the poems (the title written below), write a two-page analysis. In your presentation you will read/discuss this analysis with the class (remember, in your analysis, that the poet is not the speaker; do not say, “In ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ John Keats thinks…”).

• Again, BE SURE TO CITE ALL WORK! (

NOTE: We will sign up for individual poets, and you will have ample time to be ready for your presentation. Students not ready will receive half-credit for their presentations (if you are absent, be ready to present on the day you return). Prior to each presentation, read the poem listed below AND bring in an annotated copy of that work (ten points will be subtracted from your presentation for each time you come to class unprepared for another student’s presentation).

Poets and Their Work:

• Anonymous “Western Wind”

• W. H. Auden “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “In Memory of W. Be. Yeats”

“Musee des Beaux Arts.”

• Elizabeth Bishop “In the Waiting Room, “ “Filling Station,” “One Art”

• Gwendolyn Brooks “The Bean-Eaters,” “We Real Cool,” “The Lovers of the Poor”

• Lord Byron “She Walks in Beauty”

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

• Billy Collins “Morning,” “The Blues,” “The Art of Drowning

• Robert Creeley “For Love,” “Age,” A Wicker Basket”

• e.e. Cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town”

“I sing of olaf glad and big”

• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) ”Helen,” “Heat”

• Emily Dickinson “Because I could not stop for Death—”

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,”

“There’s a certain Slant of light”

“I heard a fly buzz when I died”

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”

• John Donne “Death, Be Not Proud”

• T.S. Eliot “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“Ash Wednesday”

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning”

“The Changing Light,” “Vast Confusion”

• Robert Frost “Design”

• Allen Ginsberg “Howl,” “America,” “A Supermarket in California”

• Nikki Giovanni “Ego Tripping”

• Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

• Seamus Heaney “Digging” and “The Harvest Bow”

• George Herbert “The Collar”

• Robert Herrick “To the Virgins…”

• Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”

• Langston Hughes “I, Too, Sing America,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

“Theme for English Be” “Montage of a Dream Deferred”

• Randall Jarrell “The Death of the Bal Turret Gunner”

• John Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”

“Ode to a Nightingale”

• Denise Levertov “When We Look Up”

• Robert Lowell “Skunk Hour,” For the Union Dead,”

• Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress”

• Edna St. Vincent Millay “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why”

• John Milton “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”

• Marianne Moore “Poetry” “Baseball and Writing”

• Frank O’Hara “In Memory of my Feelings,”

“A Step Away From Them,” “Lines to a Depressed Friend”

• Charles Olson “Excerpts from “The Maximus Poems”

• Wilfred Owen “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

• Sylvia Plath “Daddy, “ “Lady Lazarus”

• Alexander Pope “The Rape of the Lock”

• Ezra Pound “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

• Adrienne Rich “Diving into the Wreck” North American Time.”

• Theodore Roethke “I Knew a Woman,” “The Waking”

• Anne Sexton “Wanting to Die,” “The Truth the Dead Know,”

“For My Lover,” “Returning to his Wife”

• Percy Shelley “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind”

• William Shakespeare Sonnet 116, Sonnet 130

• Gary Snyder “Four Poems for Robin,” “For All,” “Hay for the Horses”

• Wallace Stevens “The Idea of Order at Key West”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

“The Snowman,” “Anecdote of the Jar”

• Sir Phillip Sydney Sonnets from Astrophel and Stella, 1 & 31

• Jonathan Swift “A Description of the Morning”

• Dylan Thomas “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” “Fern Hill”

• Walt Whitman from Song of Myself, 1, 6, & 52

“O Captain! My Captain!”

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

• William Carlos Williams “Spring and All,” “Desert Music,” The Descent”

• William Wordsworth “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey,”

• William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”

Poets and Their Time Periods

15th Century:

Anonymous “Western Wind”

16th‐17th Century

• Sir Phillip Sydney Sonnets from Astrophel and Stella, 1 & 31

• William Shakespeare Sonnet 116

• John Donne “Death, be not proud”

• George Herbert “The Collar”

• Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress”

Augustans: Wit irony and paradox are still important, but so is brevity. The ongoing subject is human frailty, often mocking human behavior (for example absurdly mundane plots in the outward appearance of heroic epic poetry, for comic effect).

John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Metaphysical Poetry: 17th century English; breaks with earlier Renaissance ideas about romantic poetry, often-introspective meditations on love, death, God, a human frailty. Wit, irony and paradox are paramount; wit is often seen as the pairing of dissimilar objects into the service of a clever, ironic analogy or paradoxical conceit. Elaborate style, deep philosophical issues.

John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-78)

18th Century

• Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

• Alexander Pope Excerpts from An Essay on Man

• Jonathan Swift “A Description of the Morning”

19th Century

• William Wordsworth “Ode,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

• Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”

• John Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

• Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death—,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “There’s a certain Slant of light”

• Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, 1, 6, & 52 and “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

(Late 18th Century into the 19th) Romantic Poetry: natural imagery redeems the imagination of the individual stuck in the crowded city. Human imagination empowers the individual to escape society’s strictures, established authority, and even the fear of death. Transcendence is the ultimate goal of the Romantic poets, transcendence in the ordinary. (Transcendental: beyond ordinary experience, idealistic, lofty. The seer-poet opens the hearts of men; it does to call to the mind; it calls to the heart. It is not meant to make the audience feel good or bad, but to feel.)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Percy Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821)

The Symbolists: Link Romanticism and Modernism. Contain the yearning for transcendence lean in a more decadent and sensual direction (leading into the Modernists). Crepuscular (dusk and dawn), dreams and dream states; synaesthesia (using one sense to describe another); drawn to music and harmony.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91)

(Late 19th Century into the 20th) Modernism: Revolutionary force, reducing human experience to fragments; influenced by cubism, try to see the world from as many points of view as possible at the same time. Concerned with how an individual relates to his environment (“Prufrock”). May focus on machines/objects rather than nature or human beings.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886- 1961), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

20th Century

Harlem Renaissance: took on the same concerns of the modernists, in the first half of the 20th century. Relies on repetitive structure similar to blues lyrics, sought a new American idiom.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), Claude McKay (188-1948), Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Postmodernism: tough to define, but takes up some of the concerns of the modernists during the 20th century—no one really uses this term. Contains parody, irony and narrative instability; allusions to pop culture as often as classical learning; binary concepts (hot and cold; black and white) often collapse; there is no real center (like the Internet); the surface is more interesting than any ideas of depth (Andy Warhol: “Wear a wig and people notice the wig. Wear a silver wig and people notice the silver.”)

May contain the Beats, Confessional, Black Arts, Black Mountain School and the New York School.

The Beats: (from Beatific, meaning saintly or blissful) stressed personal frankness; Buddhism; some tenants of Romanticism (the imagination freed from society’s constraints and the yearning for transcendence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

Confessional: Intimate content; rips the façade off of the outwardly comfortable suburban life to reveal doubts and anxieties.

John Berryman (1914-1972), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Anne Sexton (1928-1967), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

New York School: Overlapped with Beat spontaneity and Confessional frankness, but much more ironic, more interested in the surreal combination of high art and popular art allusions; wanted the reader to see the world in new and different ways, inspiring us to look or listen again.

Frank O’Hara (1926-66), John Ashberry (b. 1927), Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)

The Black Arts Movement: saw Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s as too slow; politically charged challenges to the white establishment.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones, b. 1934), Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), Ntozake Shange (b. 1948)

Black Mountain Poets: different poetry, but all taught in the same place (Black Mountain collage, North Carolina).

Charles Olson (1910-70), Denise Levertov (1923-97), Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Other Important Poets:

• Emily Dickinson (1830-86): During transcendental period, but not; compressed with and irony of metaphysical poets: “Because I could not stop for death,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

• Robert Frost (1874-1963): Active during modernism, but concerned with traditionally minded verse with a profound, philosophical vein.

• A.H. Auden (1907-73): Similar to the modernists, but transcends labels: “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “In Memory of W. Be. Yeats,” “Musee des Beaux Arts.”

• Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79): More reticent than the confessionals: “In the Waiting Room, “ “Filling Station,” “One Art”

• Adrienne Rich (b. 1929): Feminist and political, like the confessional poets, but takes the role of the poet so seriously, she is beyond them: “Diving into the Wreck,” North American Time.”

• Seamus Heaney (1939): Uses rural imagery to take on issues of identity. “Digging,” “The Harvest Bow.”

Student Sign-Up:

W. H. Auden

Elizabeth Bishop

Gwendolyn Brooks

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lord Byron

Billy Collins

Robert Creeley

e.e. cummings

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Robert Frost

Allen Ginsberg

Nikki Giovanni

Thomas Gray

Seamus Heaney

George Herbert

Robert Herrick

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Langston Hughes

Randall Jarrell

John Keats

Denise Levertov

Robert Lowell

Andrew Marvell

Edna St. Vincent Millay

John Milton

Marianne Moore

Frank O’Hara

Charles Olson

Winfred Owen

Sylvia Plath

Alexander Pope

Ezra Pound

Adrienne Rich

Theodore Roethke

Anne Sexton

Percy Shelley

William Shakespeare

Gary Snyder

Wallace Stevens

Sir Phillip Sydney

Jonathan Swift

Dylan Thomas

Walt Whitman

William Carlos Williams

William Wordsworth

William Butler Yeats

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