Folks in the Lyric class (my nickname for the course) are studying an all-out battle between warring poetic forms. Ok, so the forms aren't exactly at war...but they the practitioners of the sonnet and of free verse have argued about the validity of a form without, what we call, meter. Sandburg and Frost wrote about their diverging points of view, almost like...oh, how shall I compare them? Almost like two roads diverged in a wood! That works!
And that's what my senior students are doing...examining the form of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearian sonnets as well as Free Verse. After analysis of structure, theme, historical context, and sound, students write their own poems in the various forms. And what they've produced rocks! This stuff is hard-hitting and commendable. We're having fun writing.
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