Teaching Poetry: 20 Helpful Questions

Here are 20 helpful questions to help you get into poems. They take the back door in order to get you to notice things you might have missed on the first few reads. Taken from Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).

1. What piece of life is the poem concerned with?
2. Where and when is this life being lived?
3. What has recently happened to the speaker?
4. What aspect of the speaker’s life has been thinking about?
5. What stage of life has the speaker reached?
6. How much does the speaker tell you about his feelings?
7. Are these the feelings and remarks you would expect to be expressed in this situation?
8. Look for patterns:
a. Simple meaning—contrast (antonyms “leapt” and “thought”)
b. Word repetition (“mother,” “father”)
c. Series, similar or broken
d. Grammatical contrast
And ask: do these patterns show something about the situation in the poem that makes sense of the experience depicted?
9. Watch for “oddness,” stanza division, series, spaces, temporal changes and references to time. Ask if these show something about the situation in the poem that makes sense of the experience depicted.
10. Can you grasp the rhythms the poem’s lines enact?
11. Do the rhymes in any way suggest the plot?
12. What is the pattern of discussion in the different parts of the poem?
13. Read the poem aloud. What can you say about the tones of voice of the speaker as you read? Read the poem alongside another one and try again.
14. Description in lyric often proceeds by successive images. What picture do they give you of the speaker, if applicable?
15. How are the stanzas different from each other?
16. Rephrase the poem in prose. What happens? Does it lose its poignancy?
17. Think of three or four adjectives to describe the style of the poem.
18. Watch the patterning of pronouns. How do they change? What might it mean?
19. Take another look at your prose version of the poem. Track changes in subject, predicate, and tense. What does it mean?
20. Look at words and sentences. Ask what would happen if the poet left out this word or deleted this statement?