Poetry

In honor of National Poetry month, we bring you poetry resources from around the Web.

Quick Links:  Elementary School | High School

Elementary School

The Children's Poetry Archive allows children to listen to poets reading their works. Students can search or browse poems by theme, poetic form, or poet's name. Information about the poets is also included.

Writing with Writers: Poetry from Scholastic features online writing workshops with children's poets Jack Prelutsky, Karla Kuskin and Jean Marzollo. Don't miss children's poet laureate Jack Prelutsky reading one of his poems with sound effects.

These interactive tools from the International Reading Association's ReadWriteThink site help students create and print poems in different styles. Lessons that utilize each tool are also provided.
Acrostic Poems
Diamante Poems
Shape Poems
Letter Poem Creator

With Instant Poetry Forms, students can easily write poems in many forms such as cinquain or haiku, diamante, What if? and many more.

The Poetry Idea Engine from Scholastic gives younger students practice writing haiku, limericks, cinquains and free verse by choosing words from a list to fit into the pattern.

Word Mover from the International Reading Association ReadWriteThink site provides word magnets, and lets users add a few of their own words.

Finding the Heart in History: Making Connections through Poetry from the Library of Congress asks students to analyze and interpret primary source content, then synthesize the information and retell it from their own perspective. Students choose a historical image and write a poem online using Library of Congress resources.

Shel Silverstein has a fun website with games, animation, information about the poet, a complete list of poems and information for teachers.

Can You Haiku? is a three-lesson poetry and culture unit from the National Council of the Humanities EdSiteMent site.

High School

Sign up to receive a Poem-A-Day during National Poetry month from the website of the Academy of American Poets. Or find Poetry events in your state with the National Poetry Map

The Poetry Foundation provides lots of resources, including the Poetry Tool, which lets you browse and find poems by category, occasion, title or other characteristic, and the Video Journal featuring poetry videos for children and adults that can be watched online.

Poetry 180 from the Library of Congress provides a poem for each day of the school year, chosen for high school students by former poet Laureate Billy Collins.

The Library of Congress Poetry Home Page provides lots of poetry resources, including webcasts of famous poets reading and talking about their poetry.

The Teachers Domain Poetry Everywhere Collection features video segments drawn from the PBS Poetry Everywhere series. Each segment features a recited poem, along with a background essay and teaching suggestions. (Sign in or “Take a Test Drive,” then click on “Special Collections” and then on “Poetry Everywhere.”)

Read and experience poetry a different way with TextFlows, animated poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats and others are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, focusing attention on the subtleties of language and drawing readers deeper into the meaning of the poems. Click the “full screen” option, then use the other tools to control the speed of the animation.

Listen to poets reading their works on the BBC Arts Poetry Page.

Watch poetry slide shows at the BBC's Poems from Different Cultures site. Click "revise" to see the full text of the poem, or click "video" to see the slide show.

Wordplay from the BBC lets students create their own poems using virtual magnets. Users can choose a topic (romance, nature, sci-fi, gothic), use a background image and create poems.

The Online Poetry Classroom from the Academy of American Poets provides lesson plans, a discussion forum, and a list of poems which teachers have successfully taught in high school English and Language Arts classrooms.

Encourage students' excitement about poetry by exploring the intersection of poetry and multimedia. These examples of "e-poetry" or "New Media Poetry" might inspire young poets and artists:
Firefly by Deena Larson
Strings by Dan Waber
Traveling to Utopia: With a Brief History of the Technology by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot by Stephanie Strickland
Conversation by Jason Nelson
I, You We by Dan Waber and Jason Pimble
Shadows Never Sleep by Aya Karpinski
mar puro by Aya Karpinski

Poems that Go is a gallery of "New Media Poetry." Explore poetry and multimedia with works like these.
More e-poems can be found in the Electronic Literature Directory.

Poetry Daily, an anthology of contemporary poetry, publishes a new poem each day. Poems are chosen from the work of a wide variety of poets, including eminent as well as lesser- known poets.

The American Verse Project provides an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

Modern American Poetry is a resource for teaching created by a collaboration of poets, scholars, and readers. MAPS provides a clearinghouse for information on poets included in the Modern American Anthology of Poetry.

Poets' Corner is a library of works collected by volunteers, ranging from medieval ballads to popular songs of centuries past to interpretations of American Indian chants.

The Dickinson Electronic Archives features writings such as Dickinson's correspondence, criticism and teaching materials.

The Walt Whitman Archive from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln provides manuscripts, biographies, criticism and more.

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass from the Library of Congress traces the different occupations and preparations that led Whitman to become the author of Leaves of Grass, as well as his subsequent evolution as a poet.

Knowing Poe from Maryland Public Television introduces students to the life, works and writing techniques of Edgar Allan Poe. The site includes video clips and an interactive timeline of Poe's life.

A Frost Bouquet from the University of Virginia includes many family photographs and images of original editions including the original Frost Christmas cards.

Created 3/2009
Last updated 4/19/2012