Inside: I’ve gathered together a one-stop list of creative poems for high school 
students! Not only will you find interesting poems, but also a candid discussion about why poetry is a challenge for so many students, and what to do about that. Better yet, sign up for my mailing list and get a free formatted copy of all the poems.
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Poems for High School
“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should rage and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I can almost feel goosebumps prickling up as my professor read Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. I was 19, fresh out of high school, and hungry for knowledge. Poetry fed me.
A few years and many poems later, I imagined bringing this transformational soul filling poetry to my middle school classroom. Instead of delighting at the idea of poetry, the majority of my 8th graders were nearly gagging over just the thought. I knew it wasn’t my lack of enthusiasm or effort. Why didn’t they love poetry?
In response, I designed a lesson plan to provide formative feedback about their opinions of poetry while simultaneously engaging them in higher order thinking. (Visit that lesson here!) Over the past 9 years in the classroom, I have repeated this poetry lesson plan with a variety of demographics, and the results are almost always the same. The two main issues students have with poetry are anxiety about comprehension and actual comprehension issues.
If you teach a wonderfully affluent high schoolers who rarely struggle with comprehending poetry, scroll down to the bottom for 15 unique poems for high school!
However, for the rest of us – let’s talk about the poetry hating elephant in the room.
Actual Comprehension Issues
“I just don’t get it miss”
Such a common phrase when it comes to teaching poetry – especially in low SES areas. The achievement gap is so prominent that our lower students often lack the academic vocabulary and prior knowledge to understand poetry.
If you ask, they can usually articulate two roadblocks:
- Vocabulary
- Figurative Language
Can I get an amen?!
Vocabulary is crucial in poetry. Poets condense thoughts, so every word matters, which means If you miss one word, you may misunderstand the entire poem. We need to tell students that every word matters, but then turn around and remind them of how to unpack unfamiliar words.
Context clues, prior knowledge of similar words, and dictionaries can help struggling readers figure out tough words. But they need you to remind them! (I know you constantly remind them, but I’m reminding you to keep reminding them.)
I’m planning to tackle figurative language in a future post, so for now expose students to many examples, model your thinking, and give them time to talk through the figurative.
*Don’t forget that some high school students are just now learning to think figuratively. Even though figurative language objectives usually begin in 3rd grade, brains develop at different paces, so it may be a relatively new skill for some.*
Actual comprehension issues must be addressed through repeated exposure and conversations about poetry and by giving students strategies to help them analyze. I explained my two favorite strategies for breaking poems down in this previous post, and they will absolutely help teach poetry in high school.
Depending upon their previous experiences, Increasing comprehension may also require dealing with their fear of failure… fear of being wrong.
High School Poetry and Anxiety
High school is the culmination of years of education – and high school teachers are left to reap the benefits of years of other teachers pouring into students, and also left cleaning up the messes of less than perfect teaching.
When it comes to poetry, high school students have already made up their minds. Love it or hate it, they know how they feel. Much of their attitudes result from how previous teachers felt about or taught poetry.
One article explains this process by saying, “When we ask our college students about their in-school experiences with poetry, on the negative side the tell us about teachers who did not like poetry themselves and so flooded lessons with technical terms or turned poems into guessing games that made students feel stupid…”
Another author explains, “…What my students’ anxieties boil down to is a sense of disenfranchisement: poetry is not theirs; it does not belong to them. So far, access has only been granted to those who tow an official ‘line’, reinforcing poetry’s status as an exclusive, highbrow form perpetually out of their reach.”
During a professional development course I taught, the majority of teachers in the room admitted to feeling intimidated by poetry. Even professionals felt the fear of being wrong about a poem and looking illiterate in front of their students or peers.
Let me free you up from worry! Sandra Kaplan’s Habits of a scholar (Amazing research for your GT kiddos!) tells us that life-long learners often engage in academic humility. They know what they don’t know, and they aren’t afraid of it.
We must model academic humility with our students and learn alongside them. We can’t make high school poems pretentious or elitist – because poetry, at its origin, calls for humanity to take a moment in their busy words and think about a small, yet usually profound, truth.
Whatever has caused this poetry anxiety or disconnect, secondary educators are left to patch together the pieces. Call me an optimist, but I truly believe it’s never too late.
Bring On Unique Poems for High School!
High school is the perfect place to introduce thought provoking poems that poke and prod big ideas of humanity. Let’s face it, poetry is full of more questions than answers, and so are high schoolers!
Teachers should choose a variety of texts that
- They don’t fully understand themselves (academic humility!)
- Are layered with meaning
- Convey a variety of perspectives
- Come from different eras in history
- Are new/different from year to year (to satisfy #1)
I absolutely hope – that your classrooms are brimming with E.E. Cummings, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, and many other irreplaceable poets who spoke so loudly into quiet places. Their voices should be continually shared.
But High school teachers, don’t make dead voices the only voices you share! Poetry did not die with the classics, so we absolutely cannot ignore modern texts. Classical poems speak to universal ideas that humans have struggled with since the dawn of time, but there are modern poets speaking into this direct season of life. Their words absolutely must find a place
Just maybe you’ll find the right poem to spark that passion for poetry, or better yet, encourage higher order thinking by giving them a relatable text.
15 Unique Poems for high school:
- “Nothing”
by Laura Lee Beasley
- “What The Living Do” by Marie Howe
- Why they work: A list of poems is not complete without a morbid poem about death, so let’s take care of that right away. “Nothing” seems to personify death, but does so in a way that makes it’s the unsolved mystery of the poem. I can see that students would be engaged in solving the mystery of what the poem is about. “What the Living Do,” shares an ironic twist because it says a lot about death by sharing the details of the living. Students who have lost someone will identify with either of these poems.
- “The Indexer in Love”
- Why it works: Along with death, every list must include at least one love poem, but what a witty choice! It requires inferencing and attention to detail. It also shows an alternate structure for organizing a poem while producing a great visual.
- “Domestic Work 1937” by Natasha Tretheway
- Why it works: With this poem you can look through the lense of an English teacher, analyzing the author’s craft, but also, it lends itself to a historical perspective. Its format leaves a nice air of mystery about the speaker. Lastly, high schoolers might identify with working at a sub-par job that they will someday out grow, so many will connect with it thematically.
- “To A Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan
- “What Is Supposed to Happen” by Naomi Shihab Nye
- “On Turning Ten” By Billy Collins
- Why they work: Growing up is hard to do, and many poets explore this idea! Poems 5 – 7 discuss what it’s like to leave home and/or grow up. They show such different points of view. I have used them with a triple Venn diagram with much success, and also connected them with the Twenty One Pilots song, Stressed Out.
- “And 2morrow” – by Tupac Shakur
- Why it works: It shows that meaningful poetry doesn’t have to sound academic. Lower SES students will likely bond with Tupac’s unconventional grammar approach, and identify with the theme.
- “Evolution of a Writer”
- “Introduction to Poetry”
by Billy Collins
- “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand
- “Invitation”
- “Here is What They Don’t Tell You” By Fiona, an otherwise anonymous Tumbler writer.
- This group of poems connect to writing and reading! “Evolution of a Writer” explores being a writer.”Introduction To Poetry,” “Eating Poetry”, and “Invitation,” are poems about poetry – which is a helpful way to explore students preconceived ideas about poetry. “Introduction to Poetry” is an especially powerful way to engage reluctant students. It specifically addresses the over-teaching of poetry. “Here is What They Don’t Tell You” is different perspective about the Greek Myth of Icarus.
- ‘Kindness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye
- Why it works: These words explore the depths of what it takes for people to be kind. I could see an expository writing connection to go with this poem.
- “Missing The Mark” – by Michelle Price
- Why it works: A little shameless self-promotion by including a poem that I wrote. This poem is layered with ideas about being wrong, When I perform it, I always begin by saying, “This poem is dedicated to anyone who who has ever been wrong about everything.” It’s also models how to take different events in life and string them together on a common theme. Students can write poetry in a similar way.
- Why it works: A little shameless self-promotion by including a poem that I wrote. This poem is layered with ideas about being wrong, When I perform it, I always begin by saying, “This poem is dedicated to anyone who who has ever been wrong about everything.” It’s also models how to take different events in life and string them together on a common theme. Students can write poetry in a similar way.
The Friday Anthology series (pictured below) are my favorite for finding poems to teach! If you love poetry, you will enjoy finding gems hidden among the pages. However, if poetry isn’t your favorite, you;ll love the page that gives you ideas what skills to teach with the poem and how to teach them. Something for everyone.