Poetry for Life

In Poetry for Life, you will become acquainted with a collection of 21 poems by 15 poets composed in (or translated into) the English language. The poems have been centered around certain themes, regardless of when the poems were composed.

We will not be moving chronologically through literary periods; rather, we will be jumping about, looking at poems, despite their period, that relate to the themes upon which we will be focusing, including these themes and poets:

The Creatures Among Us featuring poems about eagles, snails, cats and fish.

The Indomitable Spiritpresenting poems dealing with persons facing physical limitations and racial injustice.

The Art of Poetrydefining what is good poetry and the struggles facing poets who choose that vocation.

The “Glory” of War describing different views of warfare over the past three centuries.

The principal goal of Poetry for Life is to engender in you an appreciation for, if not a love of, poetry. This, of course, depends to a large extent with your present fondness or (hopefully not) contempt for poetry. But, as we travel through an array of poems, I think that it is of value to examine, let me call it, the mechanics of poetry. By examining how each poem was created, we will determine the rhyme scheme of the poem (if there is one), the rhythm of the lines of the poem (if there is any perceptible rhythm) and a variety of literary devices that each poet uses to create his or her poems. By this I mean such figures of speech as similes and metaphors and other literary techniques employed by poets in creating their works, such as alliteration, irony and satire. But as we examine how the poems are created, the focus clearly will be on the poems themselves as well as the persons who created them.

But let me add a personal note. Before practicing law for some 35 years, I was an English and Journalism teacher in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And, let me add, I told people on numerous occasions, that, other than a day in trial, the toughest job I ever had was teaching. My goal at that time was to encourage my students to acquire an understanding of the accepted standards and criteria that were used to establish what were considered good novels, short stories, drama and poetry – not because works of literature were not important, though I loved them dearly, but because, in my view, that was the single-most important goal of education: to stimulate students’ abilities to think critically so that they could establish their own standards and criteria for application to every aspect of life – from making career decisions, to selecting cars to purchase, to choosing a life partner, to electing political officials, and so on through life. To establish the ability to evaluate, discriminate and assess all that is important in life, in my mind, should be the foremost goal of education.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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