History through poetry resources that help students explore historical events, people, cultures, and experiences through poems, writing, analysis, and discussion.
The complete Project Gutenberg text of Beowulf, translated from the Heyne-Socin text by Jno. Lesslie Hall, with preface, glossary, bibliography, notes, and the full Anglo-Saxon epic in English translation.
Openly licensed Grade 8 U.S. history lesson using primary sources and a Two-Voice Poem to explore perspectives of groups during the Civil War.
Openly licensed Grades 6–12 social-studies lesson in which students examine competing historical perspectives and create a two-voice poem representing different viewpoints.
Openly licensed Grades 9–10 lesson that uses contrasting perspectives, characterization, comparison, and student-created Two-Voice Poems.
A large PDF collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short tales and poems, including The Raven, Annabel Lee, The Bells, The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, and many other works.
Project Gutenberg's complete collection of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, including The Raven, The Bells, Annabel Lee, Ulalume, Eldorado, To Helen, Dreamland, and many other poems, along with notes and essays.
A free Women's History Month poetry lesson using Ada LimĂłn's 'What It Must Have Felt Like' to connect close reading and creative writing with the 19th Amendment and women's suffrage history.
Free high-school poetry lesson for analyzing and comparing medieval and modern ballads before students write and perform original ballads.
Free classroom poetry activity for grades 1–2 celebrating African American poets through selecting, discussing, reading aloud, and collecting poems for a class anthology.
Free Smithsonian K–2 poetry lesson introducing the three-line blues stanza, rhythm, music, and Langston Hughes, with younger students composing their own blues poems.
Free K–2 Smithsonian lesson introducing Brazilian embolada, a rhythmic form of improvised poetry and song, through listening, body percussion, rhythm, dialogue, and performance.
A free interdisciplinary lesson on Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus' using historical photography, repeated reading, vocabulary, evidence, immigration history, and poetry analysis.
Free Library of Congress interdisciplinary lesson combining primary-source research, historical analysis, poetic craft, multimedia, and collaborative epic-poem writing.
Free Library of Congress poetry lesson for grades 6–12 in which students use Depression-era oral histories and primary sources to create found poetry.
Free Grade 9 interdisciplinary lesson connecting Harlem Renaissance poetry with art, music, dance, research, museum exhibits, and historical context.
A free lesson using Joy Harjo's 'Perhaps the World Ends Here' and Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table imagery to explore family rituals, imagery, voice, visual analysis, and creative writing.
Free high-school poetry lesson using Langston Hughes to connect poetry analysis, historical context, research, social issues, and original writing.
A free poetry lesson using Maya Angelou's 'Alone' to teach speaker, repetition, theme, close reading, listening, discussion, creative response, and broader study of Angelou's poetry.
Free middle-school poetry lesson using Maya Angelou's writing and primary-source photographs to connect poetry with civil rights, history, research, and visual literacy.
Free high-school poetry unit using Romantic art and William Wordsworth to teach literary history, close reading, TP-CASTT poetry analysis, and analytical writing.
A free poetry lesson using Sara Teasdale's 'The Crystal Gazer' to explore imagery, speaker, stanza, selfhood, close reading, discussion, creative response, and modernist context.
A free collection of Women's History Month poems appropriate for young people, with links to related lesson plans and works by classic and contemporary women poets.
A free background resource highlighting women who served as U.S. consultants in poetry or poets laureate, useful for Women's History Month research, poet studies, timelines, and classroom presentations.
A curated collection of free poetry lesson plans for Women's History Month featuring women poets including Lucille Clifton, Emma Lazarus, Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, and others.
A free poetry lesson centered on Katharine Rolston Fisher's poem about suffragist Alice Paul, with primary-source imagery, close reading, women's suffrage research, writing, and extension projects.
A free poetry and civil-rights lesson using Mahogany L. Browne's poem about Fannie Lou Hamer to explore voting rights, activism, history, close reading, discussion, and research.
A free poetry lesson using Kwoya Fagin Maples's 'Invisible Work' to explore care, family labor, women's work, imagery, close reading, creative writing, comparison, and visual culture.
A free poetry lesson pairing Rita Dove's 'Girls On the Town, 1946' with Rosie the Riveter imagery to explore women, beauty, World War II, history, close reading, and Women's History Month writing.
A free classroom poetry lesson using Lucille Clifton's 'sisters' to develop close reading, listening, discussion, interpretation, poetic-technique analysis, and understanding of women's voices.
A free poetry lesson using Mara Pastor's bilingual poem 'Flora numérica / Numeric Flora' to explore imagery, historical women and trailblazers, women poets, discussion, and research.
A broad free Women's History Month poetry collection with poems, women-poet profiles, audio, video, essays, archival material, books, and lesson plans for classroom exploration.
A free collection connecting poetry with the centennial of the 19th Amendment, women's suffrage, women's history and rights, and new work commissioned from women poets.
A free poetry and history lesson using Aimee Nezhukumatathil's 'One Vote' to explore voting, the women's suffrage movement, the 19th Amendment, visual sources, creative writing, and civic research.
A free poetry lesson using Paisley Rekdal's 'Wild Horses' to explore persona poetry, Seraph Young Ford, voting, women's suffrage, the 19th Amendment, creative work, and research.
A free lesson on Alice Duer Miller's satirical suffrage poem 'Our Own Twelve Anti-suffragist Reasons,' using a political cartoon, close reading, satire, women's suffrage history, comparison, and research.
Openly licensed high-school World War I lesson using 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and historical sources to connect poetry, perspective, evidence, and wartime history.
Openly licensed Grade 8 history lesson that uses primary sources and Two-Voice Poetry to compare competing perspectives on Manifest Destiny.
A guided poem-analysis worksheet asking students to examine physical format, title, author, repeated and expressive words, personal response, audience, author purpose, historical context, effectiveness, unanswered questions, and further research.
Project Gutenberg's extensive collection of Robert Burns poetry and songs, including To a Mouse, Auld Lang Syne, Address to a Haggis, Tam o' Shanter, ballads, elegies, songs, epistles, satires, and other works.
Openly licensed Grade 9 lesson that develops comprehension of Shakespearean language through comparison, paraphrase, close reading, music, and a blackout-poetry activity.
A two-to-three-day Grade 5-6 haiku lesson by DeVern H. Phillips covering Japanese origins, kigo, seasonal imagery, syllabication, 5-7-5 structure, model poems, guided practice, brainstorming, and original haiku writing.
An extensive 80-page high school poetry unit from Jefferson County Public Schools with lessons on active reading, poetry vocabulary, oral reading, poetic conventions, sensory imagery, voice, titles, rhyme, figurative language, poetic devices, organization, line breaks, revision, and classroom strategies.
Openly licensed Grades 9–12 U.S. history lesson connecting civil-rights primary texts, segregation and integration, paired-text analysis, and creation of a two-voice poem.
Project Gutenberg's large public-domain edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and other poems, with editorial notes, glosses, historical material, and Middle English literary works.
Project Gutenberg's collection of Rupert Brooke's poetry, based on the 1915 edition and including an introduction, biographical material, sonnets, lyric poems, and poems associated with Brooke's First World War reputation.
George Buchanan Gray's 1915 scholarly study of Hebrew poetry, examining parallelism, rhythm, metre, strophe, criticism, interpretation and the poetic structure of Old Testament texts.
A grades 3-5 lesson plan on the history and characteristics of haiku, including its Japanese origins, Matsuo Basho, seasonal words, the 5-7-5 pattern, nature imagery, classroom writing, assessment questions, and an illustration activity.
Openly licensed Grade 9 poetry lesson exploring the history, cultural influences, performance traditions, and literary perspectives of spoken word poetry.
A Smithsonian classroom guide connecting poetry and music through ballad stanzas, blues, iambic rhythm, meter, scansion, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and hands-on activities that move poetry from the page into rhythm and performance.
A grades 7–8 lesson using Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus to teach author perspective, vocabulary, poetry analysis, immigration history, and perspective writing.
Project Gutenberg collection of Walt Whitman's patriotic, Civil War, democracy, and American poems, including O Captain! My Captain!, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, I Hear America Singing, and other works.
Openly licensed Grade 9–10 poetry lesson in which students compare poetry and speeches, analyze word choice and rhetorical strategies, compose a poem, and consider poetry as a vehicle for change.
Project Gutenberg's full text of T. S. Eliot's modernist poem The Waste Land, including its five major sections and notes from the public-domain edition.
Project Gutenberg Volume 5 of the Raven Edition, containing Poe's poems and poetic essays including The Raven, The Bells, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Poetic Principle, Old English Poetry, and many other works.
John Stuart Mill's influential essay examining the nature of poetry, emotion, imagination, narrative, description, eloquence, and the distinction between poetry and other forms of expression.
Openly licensed high-school lesson using Woody Guthrie, song lyrics, historical context, and blackout poetry to explore social commentary, figurative meaning, and poetic expression.
A 2001 scholarly article by Shannon Wiltsey Stirman and James W. Pennebaker examining word-use patterns across poems by suicidal and nonsuicidal poets using computerized text analysis and social-integration and hopelessness models.
PoetrySoup's teacher resources are designed to help educators find useful poetry lesson plans, worksheets, writing activities, poetry analysis materials, and classroom resources for students at different grade levels.
Resources may include original PoetrySoup teaching materials, openly licensed educational resources, and carefully selected links to trusted educational organizations. Downloadable materials can be printed and used in the classroom according to the license and attribution information provided with each resource.