New Product Thursday: Poetry Terms Unit

I cannot wait for April! The birds tweeting, the sun shining, the pink trees blooming all over Shanghai…and it’s National Poetry Month! I have always loved teaching poetry and poetic forms with middle and high school students, especially when I am able to use music lyrics to help them remember the terms and concepts.

So this week’s New Product Thursday is all about poetry! Though I have many librarian followers, this one is probably most useful for English teachers, particularly at the high school level. I’m advertising this as for Grades 8-11, but I will say that I have taught many of these poems and poetry terms with my sixth and seventh graders, too.

Because I love teaching poetry so much, I am dedicating the rest of March to creating poetry resources for my TPT store. This week, I’m starting with a big one: a 57-slide PowerPoint of poetry terms, plus a printable poetry packet of 39 classic poems that I use to demonstrate each poetry concept. All text on the PowerPoint and poetry packet is fully-editable, and all of the PowerPoint slides include beautiful, colorful photos. I am seriously so proud of how gorgeous this one turned out to be!

And my favorite part? I also pair each term with contemporary music that also uses that poetry device in the song! I really love all kinds of music and will rock out to almost any genre. Pairing music lyrics with classic poems helps make poetry more accessible and memorable for teens. Y’all, this product was seriously so much fun to create! I so enjoyed picking out just the right songs to go with each concept!


The poetry terms in the PowerPoint include:

  • alliteration
  • assonance
  • consonance
  • imagery
  • figurative language
  • rhyme
  • internal rhyme
  • end rhyme
  • rhyme scheme
  • tone
  • mood
  • denotative meaning
  • connotative meaning
  • repetition
  • couplet
  • onomatopoeia
  • canto
  • line
  • stanza
  • metaphor
  • simile
  • hyperbole
  • personification
  • imagery
  • symbol
  • theme
  • rhythm
  • sonnet–Shakespearean
  • sonnet–Petrarchan



Poems included in the packet:

  • “Success Is Counted Sweetest” by Emily Dickinson
  • “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” by Emily Dickinson
  • “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson
  • excerpt from “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” by William Shakespeare
  • “Take All My Loves” by William Shakespeare
  • “Chaos In Fourteen Lines” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes
  • “Stopping By Woods” by Robert Frost
  • “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
  • “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost
  • “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
  • “America: My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” by Samuel Francis Smith
  • “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” by W.E.B. DuBois
  • Side-by-Side Comparison of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” poems
  • “The Tyger” by William Blake
  • “The Lamb” by William Blake
  • “The Sick Rose” by William Blake
  • “Richard Cory” by E.A. Robinson
  • “O Captain! My Captain” by Walt Whitman
  • “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phyllis Wheatley
  • “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
  • “How Doth the Little Crocodile” by Lewis Carroll
  • “O My Luve Is Like a Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns
  • “If” by Rudyard Kipling
  • “Fog” by Carl Sandburg
  • “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens
  • “War Girls” by Jessie Pope
  • “Sorrow” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • “The Heart of a Woman” by Georgia Douglas Johnson
  • “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
  • “Song: To Celia” by Ben Jonson
  • “Song of the Witches” (excerpt from Macbeth) by William Shakespeare


Click here or on any photo in this post to view this product on TPT.

Stay tuned for more new poetry resources over the next few Thursdays!