AP English
Mr. Evans
NAME______________________________________
Period____________________ Date______________
Day 1-
Introduction to Poetry
How to Read a Poem
Find an article or website that tells students how to read poetry, report back to class.
Day 2-
Poetry Terms and Tips& Early English Poets: John Donne
Read A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, The Flea, and Death, Be Not Proud pages 792-794
Day 3-
“Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets” Sonnets and Shakespeare’s sonnets
Read Sonnet 29, 73, 116, 130, 146 (In text find page numbers in index, or on web)
Day 4-
Shakespeare’s Top 5-ONLINE-Link on School Wires, you have to go through the list.
Read Sonnet 18, 154, 138, 60, 43 online-http://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html
Day 5-
John Keats- Ode to a Grecian Urn, To Autumn in text book
Edgar Allan Poe- To Helen in text book A Dream within a Dream, The Conqueror Worm online
Day 6-
Alfred Lord Tennyson- The Eagle, Ulysses in textbook
William Wordsworth- I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Solitary Reaper in textbook
In-class (take home) Essay Due
Day 7-
Walt Whitman-Poem on page 721, and poem on page 634
Emily Dickinson- poem on 745, I Got so I could hear his name, This was a Poet-It is That in text
Day 8-
William Butler Yeats- Annunciation, For Anne Gregory, Sailing to Byzantium in textbook
William Carlos Williams-The Artist, The Dance, The Use of Force in textbook
Day 9 -
Langston Hughes-Mother to Son, Negro Speaks of River, The South, Dream Boogie in textbook
T.S. Eliot- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in textbook
Day 10-
Anne Sexton- Her Kind, The Starry Night in textbook
Sylvia Plath- Daddy, Metaphors in textbook
Day 11-
Poem Sharing
Poem Due
Day 12-
Overflow Day
Day 13-
In-class Essay
In Class Essay-50 points (2 of them)
You will be given a poetry essay prompt taken directly from a past year’s AP Exam. You will do this two times
this unit. Unlike previous times, one of these will be take home, but done in the same fashion as it would in
class.
Poem/Poet Presentation- 60 points
With 1(one) other person you will be responsible for leading a class discussion based on a poet we will study in
our unit. You will choose from the list of poets given to you. You will come to class prepared to give a brief
(>5 mins) background on the poet. Then you will guide the class through 1 poem assigned by Mr. Evans from
that poet. You should be prepared to share your own understanding of the poem and you may want to include
understandings you found elsewhere (textbook, online, etc). However, this is not simply a presentation, but you
are doing Mr. Evans’s job and guiding the class through a discussion. That being said it may be worth your
while to prepare discussion questions or be prepared to assign students tasks in order to guide our poetry
analysis. Expect to be leading the class for at least 20mins, (Half the period).
Point Breakdown:
Poet Background: 10 points
Your understanding: 20 points
Your discussion leading: 30 points
Poem Writing-20 points
The subject of the poem is of your choosing and should reflect your interests and well you. It MUST be in the
form of a Shakespearean Sonnet.
Do not forget your holiday reading assignment and essay due the
first day back from break!