For most of us, poetry is intimidating. We may have memories of feeling uncomfortable in our school encounters with poetry. Humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson marks National Poetry Month by offering ways for those who are new to the form to approach poetry with comfort, confidence, and joy. For those who know poetry well, he provides a  reminder of why good poetry is so satisfying—and necessary to a healthy civilization.

Explore a dozen or so relatively short poems, first to tease out their "argument" (a paraphrase of what's going on in the poem), then to notice the ways in which poetic language, meter, and tone deepen and enrich the verse. Works will be selected from authors who span the centuries and may include poems by Shakespeare, John Donne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Langston Hughes.  

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