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Baseballs being thrown
Gloves catching the balls while they
Sore through the fresh air
Cat 9 Composites
Hitting nukes over the fence while
Fielders watch the ball
Fielding the ball and
Throwing the ball over to first
While the runner sprints

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Check Out This Incredibly Inventive Way to Arrange Your Books

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Book Spine Poetry has taken over the literary world.

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How to Write a Diamante Poem – Kenn Nesbitt’s Poetry4kids.com

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The delightful nonsense of limericks for kids

With their silly rhymes, punny twists, and hilariously cheeky endings, limericks for kids are a match made in heaven. Limericks are an age-old form of humorous verse thought to have originated in medieval Ireland-perhaps in the town of Limerick itself! Usually, limerick examples are found in the form of a five-line poem, with two separate rhyme schemes: one shared by the first, second, and fifth lines, and the other shared by the shorter third and fourth lines. While some funny limericks are based on clever wordplay, these kid-friendly verses are sure to have your children in stitches. You may also want to try some of these other clever jokes like short jokes for kids, riddles for kids, and knock-knock jokes for kids to keep up the laughs.

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20 Quirky Limericks for Kids That Everyone Will Find Funny

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The five-line rhyme scheme for limericks offers lots of laughs. Even the greenest lads and lasses will enjoy these funny limericks for kids.

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A couplet is two lines of poetry that usually rhyme. Here's a famous couplet: "Good night! Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow."

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A couplet is two lines of poetry that usually rhyme. Here's a famous couplet: "Good night! Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow."

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This is a modern version of Browning's sonnet. 

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This is a modern version of Browning's sonnet. 

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How Do I Love Thee? Book Read Aloud for Kids!

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Bite-Sized Lesson: How to Write a Haiku Poem

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Writing a free verse poem requires imagination. Here are some free verse poems for kids that your child can read and take inspiration from to write one.

These poems do not adhere to any norms and do not follow meter, rhyme scheme, or structure-just like the carefree nature of children. If you wish to teach them to write one, this post brings you some tips and tricks.

How To Write A Free Verse Poem For Kids

Writing a free verse poem may sound simple, but it is always a good idea to follow certain guidelines. Keep reading for some easy-to-follow tips.

Choose your topic or theme: Although you are telling a story and letting your thoughts run wild with your free verses, you need to settle on a theme. Pick a situation, emotion, or object and try to build your poem around it. Next, jot down the thoughts, words, names, characters, or personifications related to the topic or theme.

Use descriptive words: Descriptive words or adjectives will give life to your ideas and make your poem unique. Some words that you may include are colors, numbers, sizes, shapes, and textures.

Review and edit for grammar mistakes: Free verse poetry doesn't follow a structure or any rules, but it is important the poets avoid grammatical errors. Basic mistakes can ruin the entire poem and put the reader off.

Use imagery: Usage of similes, metaphors, personifications, and idioms can make a free verse poem beautiful and interesting. For example, when a poet uses similes, it gives the reader the impression that; they know how to link or connect one thing to another.

Be expressive: While writing, be expressive and pour your thoughts into the poem.

Try to keep it short: Keep the poem short and sweet. Adding jargon and using too many lines to express an idea would spoil the essence of a free verse poem. Hence, sticking to a short format is ideal.

10 Examples Of Free Verse Poems For Kids

Here are some examples of creative and beautiful yet simple-to-read free verse poems for children.

1. Follow The Moon

I walked on through the night.
The moon followed me home,
Or did I follow the moon?
I don't quite know."
-Marie Tully

2. City of Potholes

"Zig-zagging down the road
Trying not to stray over the center line
Or hit a curb
Or break an axle
Or flatten a tire
Or wind up in the next surprise sinkhole.
Driving in Toledo is not a sport
For the timid or the sane or the under-insured."
-Kelly Roper

3. Cloud

"A blue stain
creeps across
the deep pile
of the evergreens.
From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees, a color
passed from one
to another, a
requirement
to which they
submit unflinchingly
like soldiers or
brave people
getting older.
Then the sun
comes back and
it's totally over."

-Kay Ryan

4. A Happy Child

I have a tree, a green, green tree,
To shade me from the sun.
And under it I often sit,
When all my play is done."
-Anonymous

5. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

"While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
-Ezra Pound"

6. Real Silence

"I longed for real silence
the kind you can't find
but stumble upon
in some cabin
somewhere
on a lake without a moon
where you hear the cigarette burn
and the candles flicker
and your mind dances alive
to the symphonies in the black."
-Atticus

7. Spring Has Finally Arrived

My snowy, winter days are gone.
I mourn them, but I hear a song
Of birds in trees; wind chimes ring.
I guess it might as well be spring!"
-Lhtheaker

8. Up Above

"Up above
Sits our nanny
In her rocking chair,
She's smiling down upon us.
It's nice to know she's there
Her star is shining brightly.
We find it every night,
The big one in the middle above our house at night."
-Becki B.

9. No Celebration

Nothing new will happen.
Nothing old will ever change.
The past has left its scars.
Now only old memories remain."
-John P. Read

10. Autumn

"A touch of cold in the Autumn night-
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children."
-T.E. Hulme

Writing these poems can help anyone express their thoughts and emotions freely. Just a pen, paper and your imagination can let your child unleash their inner poet. Take cues from this list of free verse poems for kids and help them develop their poetry skills.

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10 Best Examples Of Free Verse Poems For Kids

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Writing a free verse poem requires imagination. Here are some free verse poems for kids that your child can read and take inspiration from to write one. These poems do not adhere to any norms and do not follow meter, rhyme scheme, or structure-just like the carefree nature of children.

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🇺🇸 Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman reads "Talking Gets Us There" | PBS KIDS Talk About | PBS KIDS

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Add your own poems here! (I might post some of yours, too.)

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Add your own poems here! (I might post some of yours, too.)

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An acrostic poem is a poem where certain letters in each line spell out a word or phrase. Typically, the first letters of each line are used to spell the message, but they can appear anywhere. These examples will help you see how you can use this form in different ways.

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Learn to make your own name or word poetry with these acrostic poem examples and a handy template. An acrostic poem is a poem where certain letters in each line spell out a word or phrase. Typically, the first letters of each line are used to spell the message, but they can appear anywhere. These examples will help you see how you can use this form in different ways.

Acrostic Poems Using the First Letter

One of the most common types of acrostic poems is where you use the first letter to spell a word or phrase. You can have a lot of fun with this format. Here are some examples.

CANDY CATS FEAR SPRING HOUSE Acrostic Poem Examples Using Different Positions

Although an acrostic poem often uses the first letter of each line, it doesn't have to. You can also make one using letters at the end of the line or in different places in each line. This creates a kind of "code." The letters that spell out the word are still capitalized.

POEM FOOD SPORTS STAR SCHOOL Acrostic Poems That Spell Names

If you're thinking of writing an acrostic poem for kids or trying to illustrate an acrostic poem definition with real-world examples, nothing beats writing a poem with someone's name. Kids can choose their own names to write, or you can pick one at random. For inspiration, check out these acrostic poem examples where the letters spell out someone's name.

MARION BETTY SOPHIA ROBERTO WILLIAM Acrostic Poem Examples from Literature

Several famous authors have written acrostic poems over the years, and these can be great examples of what you can do with this unique type of poem. Some even use a rhyme scheme in addition to the acrostic form.

"An Acrostic" by Edgar Allan Poe... From "Georgiana Augusta Keats" by John Keats... "Acrostic" by Lewis Carroll... "Acrostic from Aegina" by David Mason Acrostic Poem Template

In many ways, an acrostic poem is like an acronym. If you think about a specific letter in each line standing for a letter in a word, you'll be able to write your own. Be open to experimentation, and have fun. This handy template can help.

Click Image to View and Download PDF

Image Credits

calvindexter / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty

Have Fun Being Creative

Learning about different poetic forms is a great way to expand your horizons as a reader and a creative writer. Once you've mastered the acrostic poem, try out shape poems too. Also called concrete poems, these poems make the shape of something related to the content they describe. No matter what form you choose, it's just fun to be creative.

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Learn to make your own name or word poetry with these acrostic poem examples and a handy template. An acrostic poem is a poem where certain letters in each line spell out a word or phrase. Typically, the first letters of each line are used to spell the message, but they can appear anywhere.

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"Women" by celebrated author Alice Walker takes a close look at the sacrifices African American women, especially of her mother's generation, took to make sure that their children had better educations and futures than they did. Walker said that she wrote this particular piece for her mother, who was a maid and the wife of an unsuccessful sharecropper. Her mother was determined that Alice and her siblings would receive an education so that they could have better opportunities available to them.

The poem analyzes the themes of the strength of women in the face of danger and adversity, the hopes of mothers for their children, and the sacrifices women make. The poem is a single stanza, and uses lines that are no more than five words long, with some lines as few as one word long. Alice describes women of her "mama's generation", women who were strong inside and out. They did their chores and did their best to ensure that their children were educated. The narrator ends the poem with a tone of admiration that while these women were often not educated themselves. They knew it was important for the next generation to have access to education.

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"Women" by celebrated author Alice Walker takes a close look at the sacrifices African American women, especially of her mother's generation, took to make sure that their children had better educations and futures than they did. Walker said that she wrote this particular piece for her mother, who was a maid and the wife of an unsuccessful sharecropper.

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Teach Living Poets opens up the flourishing world of contemporary poetry to secondary teachers, giving advice on discovering new poets and reading contemporary poetry, as well as sharing sample lessons, writing prompts, and ways to become an engaged member of a professional learning community.

Continue reading

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Complicating the canon and empowering students through poetry

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Poetry Forms - Definitions and Examples

Sonnet - a short rhyming poem with 14 lines. The original sonnet form was invented in the 13/14th century by Dante and an Italian philosopher named Francisco Petrarch. The form remained largely unknown until it was found and developed by writers such as Shakespeare. Sonnets use iambic meter in each line and use line-ending rhymes.

For more about Sonnets, read How To Write A Sonnet

Limerick - a five-line witty poem with a distinctive rhythm. The first, second and fifth lines, the longer lines, rhyme. The third and fourth shorter lines rhyme. (A-A-B-B-A).

For more about Limericks, read How To Write A Limerick on the FFP Poetry Forums

Haiku - This ancient form of poem writing is renowned for its small size as well as the precise punctuation and syllables needed on its three lines. It is of ancient Asian origin.

Haiku's are composed of 3 lines, each a phrase. The first line typically has 5 syllables, second line has 7 and the 3rd and last line repeats another 5. In addition there is a seasonal reference included.

For more about Haiku, read How To Write A Haiku

Narrative - A narrative poem tells the story of an event in the form of a poem. There is a strong sense of narration, characters, and plot. It may be dramatic, with objectives and diverse characters. Narrative poetry may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex.

See About Narrative Poems and Examples of Narrative Poems

Epic - a lengthy narrative poem in grand language celebrating the adventures and accomplishments of a legendary or conventional hero

Couplet - two lines of verse which rhyme and form a unit alone or as part of a poem.

See Stanzas - Couplet, Tercet And Quatrain

Free Verse - A Free Verse Poem does not follow any rules. Their creation is completely in the hands of the author. Rhyming, syllable count, punctuation, number of lines, number of stanzas, and line formation can be done however the author wants in order to convey the idea. There is no right or wrong way to create a Free Verse poem.

See Free Verse Poem Examples

- An acrostic poem is a poem where the one letter in each line spells out a word or phrase vertically that acts as the theme or message of the poem. The word used for the acrostic can be the name of the person you are writing the acrostic about, a message such as Happy Birthday or a theme such as Acceptance, Love or Hope.
How to Write an Acrostic Poem
Read more: 15 Poetry Forms with PDF Templates

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Types Of Poems - Simple Poetry Forms, Definitions and Examples

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All Types Of Poems. How to write a Limerick, a Sonnet Tutorial and How to write a Haiku. Poems of all different types, genres, form and themes. Examples and Definitions.

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The Greatest Poet You've never heard of...

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The Greatest Poet You've never heard of...

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 Eating Poetry by Mark Strand - Poems | Academy of American Poets 

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 Eating Poetry by Mark Strand - Poems | Academy of American Poets 

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Eating Poetry - Ink runs from the corners of my mouth

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Grand Slam Poetry Champion | Harry Baker | TEDxExeter

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Deer Hit - You're seventeen and tunnel-vision drunk,

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Dear Basketball - Kobe Bryant [1978-2020]

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-Lamar Jordan: Topic: Conversation with homeless veteran

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-Lamar Jordan: Topic: Conversation with homeless veteran

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They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door

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Still I Rise - Discover the meaning behind Maya Angelou's inspiring poem, with an audio recording of actress Rosie Perez reading this classic work, which has been celebrated by Serena Williams, Cory Booker, and other public figures.

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The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

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On Turning Ten - On Turning Ten Poem by Billy Collins

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The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

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Welcome to Shel Silverstein | Shel Silverstein

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Shel Silverstein's children's books, stories, poetry, illustrations, fun activities for kids, and teaching resources.

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Writing a Cinquain Poem - Poetry Teatime

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The following comes from Brave Writer’s Playing With Poetry online class taught by our very own Susanne Barrett.

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Limerick Poems for Kids | Classroom Poetry Video

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Among all female poets of the English-speaking world in the 19th century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. She had a wide following among cultured readers in England and in the United States. An example of the reach of her fame may be seen in the influence she had upon the reclusive poet who lived in the rural college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. A framed portrait of Barrett Browning hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, whose life had been transfigured by the poetry of "that Foreign Lady." From the time when she had first become acquainted with Barrett Browning's writings, Dickinson had ecstatically admired her as a poet and as a woman who had achieved such a rich fulfillment in her life. So highly regarded had she become by 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death, that she was prominently mentioned as a possible successor to the poet laureateship. Her humane and liberal point of view manifests itself in her poems aimed at redressing many forms of social injustice, such as the slave trade in America, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England, the oppression of the Italian people by the Austrians, and the restrictions forced upon women in 19th-century society.

Elizabeth Barrett was extremely fortunate in the circumstances of her family background and the environment in which she spent her youth. Her father, whose wealth was derived from extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica, was the proprietor of "Hope End," an estate of almost 500 acres in Herefordshire, between the market town of Ledbury and the Malvern Hills. In this peaceful setting, with its farmers' cottages, gardens, woodlands, ponds, carriage roads, and mansion "adapted for the accommodation of a nobleman or family of the first distinction," Elizabeth-known by the nickname "Ba"-at first lived the kind of life that might be expected for the daughter of a wealthy country squire. She rode her pony in the lanes around the Barrett estate, went with her brothers and sisters for walks and picnics in the countryside, visited other county families to drink tea, accepted visits in return, and participated with her brothers and sisters in homemade theatrical productions. But, unlike her two sisters and eight brothers, she immersed herself in the world of books as often as she could get away from the social rituals of her family. "Books and dreams were what I lived in and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like bees about the grass," she said many years later. Having begun to compose verses at the age of four, two years later she received from her father for "some lines on virtue penned with great care" a ten-shilling note enclosed in a letter addressed to "the Poet-Laureate of Hope End."

Before Barrett was 10 years old, she had read the histories of England, Greece, and Rome; several of Shakespeare's plays, including Othello and The Tempest; portions of Pope's Homeric translations; and passages from Paradise Lost. At 11, she says in an autobiographical sketch written when she was 14, she "felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages." Except for some instruction in Greek and Latin from a tutor who lived with the Barrett family for two or three years to help her brother Edward prepare for entrance to Charterhouse, Barrett was, as Robert Browning later asserted, "self-taught in almost every respect." Within the next few years she went through the works of the principal Greek and Latin authors, the Greek Christian fathers, several plays by Racine and Molière, and a portion of Dante's Inferno-all in the original languages. Also around this time she learned enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enthusiasm for the works of Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft presaged the concern for human rights that she was later to express in her poems and letters. At the age of 11 or 12 she composed a verse "epic" in four books of rhyming couplets, The Battle of Marathon, which was privately printed at Mr. Barrett's expense in 1820. She later spoke of this product of her childhood as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." Most of the 50 copies that were printed probably went to the Barretts' home and remained there. It is now the rarest of her works, with only a handful of copies known to exist.

At the age of 20 Barrett offered to the public, with no indication of authorship, a slender volume entitled An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826). Long afterwards in a letter to an American critic she called the book "a girl's exercise, nothing more nor less!-not at all known to the public." The poem for which the volume was named was a pretentious and frigid effort to survey in some 88 pages the history of science, philosophy, and poetry, from ancient Greece to the present. The other 14 poems were occasional pieces or verses of a personal nature which did not yet display the author's authentic voice. Of the two journals which noticed the volume, one objected to its obscurity of language and its "barren themes," and the other advised the poet to come down from the heights to look more closely at nature.

Shortly after the publication of this volume Barrett entered into one of the most important friendships of her life. Hugh Stuart Boyd, a totally blind, middle-aged dilettante scholar with private means, had published at his own expense several volumes of translations from the Greek patristic writings. Since the author of the "Essay on Mind" lived not far from him, he was eager to become acquainted with a poet of such extraordinary erudition. From his home in Malvern Wells he sent her copies of his works and invited her to pay him a visit. Starved as she was for intellectual companionship, she eagerly began to correspond with him and before long was making frequent visits to Ruby Cottage, where he lived with his wife and daughter. It was entirely owing to Boyd's influence that Barrett's enthusiasm for Greek studies was rekindled. During this period she read an astonishing amount of classical Greek literature-Homer, Pindar, the tragedians, Aristophanes, and passages from Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Xenophon-as well as the Greek Christian Fathers Boyd had translated.

In 1832 the peaceful, secure lives of the Barretts in their Herefordshire retreat came to a distressing close. For a number of years the Jamaican plantations of the Barrett family had been mismanaged and Mr. Barrett had suffered serious financial losses. With the prospect of a greatly reduced income he could no longer afford to maintain the Hope End estate and suffered the embarrassment of having to sell it at a public auction to satisfy creditors. The 11 children and their father (Mrs. Barrett had died in 1828) went to live temporarily in Sidmouth, on the southern coast of Devonshire. The reason for the choice of this town in the south of England may have been Mr. Barrett's concern for Elizabeth's health. At the age of 15 she had injured her spine when she was attempting to saddle her pony. Seven years later the breaking of a blood vessel in the chest left her with a weakened constitution and a chronic cough. During the period of the Barretts' stay in Sidmouth, Boyd lived for a year and a half within a few minutes' walk from their home. To the detriment of her own poetic career she went to him daily and helped him to see through the press a bizarre volume on his favorite subject, the Greek Christian Fathers. By the time she left Sidmouth Browning's feelings toward Boyd had changed: she now saw him as limited, naive, and even pathetic. The one volume that she produced while at Sidmouth was Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus; and Miscellaneous Poems, published anonymously in 1833. 12 years later in a letter to Boyd she called the translation "that frigid, rigid exercise," and after her marriage she made amends by writing a vastly improved version. The "miscellaneous poems" give little promise of their author's future distinction.

After living for three years in several rented houses in the coastal town, the Barretts moved in 1835 to London, which was to remain their permanent place of residence. Barrett made her name known in literary circles with The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838). Except for the privately printed Battle of Marathon, this was the first work with her name on the title page. She said that the volume, despite some shortcomings, was "the first utterance of my own individuality." Almost all of the many reviews that appeared in England and America hailed her as a young poet of extraordinary ability and still greater promise. The long poetic drama of 78 pages for which the volume was named presents the conversation of two angels in the heavens retelling portions of the Old and New Testaments, and commenting on the Crucifixion then taking place. Although most of the critics considered the poem too mystical and too high-flown to be successful, they generally praised the shorter poems, most of which now seem sentimental and trite. A poem that soon became a great favorite with both professional critics and the general public was "Isobel's Child," with its depiction of the death of a three-month-old baby who has been lying all night in the mother's arms. The well-known critic John Wilson ("Christopher North") declared that there was beauty in all the poems and that some were "altogether beautiful."

Just as Barrett was being recognized as one of England's most original and gifted young poets, she was in such poor health because of the weakness of her lungs that her physician recommended that she move away from London and live for a while in a warmer climate. Torquay, on the south coast of Devonshire, was selected, and there, together with various members of her family who took turns living with her, she remained for three years as an invalid under the watchful care of her physicians. Seriously ill as she was, she suffered a sudden shattering blow that left her prostrated for months. The death by drowning on July 11, 1840 of her favorite brother, Edward, who had been with her constantly at Torquay, was the greatest sorrow of her life. The memory of that tragic event remained with her as long as she lived and was so painful that she could never speak of it even to those closest to her.

When she returned to the family home at 50 Wimpole Street after the three terrible years at Torquay, she felt that she had left her youth behind and that the future held little more than permanent invalidism and confinement to her bedroom. For the following five years she remained mostly in her room, which she decorated with busts of Homer and Chaucer and later with engravings of Browning (whom she had not yet met), Tennyson, Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, and Wordsworth. Despite her frail health, she was more fortunate in her circumstances than most women writers of her time. Thanks to inheritances from her grandmother and her uncle, she was the only one of the brothers and sisters who was independently wealthy. As the eldest daughter in a family without a mother, she normally would have been expected to spend much of her time supervising the domestic servants, but her weakness prevented her from leaving her room. Thus the members of her family came to visit with her and to bring her everything she desired. Relieved of all household burdens and financial cares, she was free to devote herself to reading English and French fiction and memoirs and to writing letters, essays, and poetry. Since the prospect of meeting strangers made her nervous, only two visitors besides her family had the privilege of seeing her in her room: John Kenyon, a minor poet and friend of many English poets, and the well-known writer Mary Russell Mitford. During her last year or two at Wimpole Street she also received the Reverend George B. Hunter, whom she had come to know during her years at Sidmouth, and the art critic Anna Jameson.

Protected from the outside world and surrounded by a loving family, Barrett resumed her literary career, which had been partially interrupted during her serious illness at Torquay. In addition to producing a continuous flow of poems for publication in both English and American journals, she wrote a series of articles on the Greek Christian poets and another series on the English poets, the latter originally begun as a critique of a recently published anthology of English verse. Also, in collaboration with the playwright Richard Hengist Horne, she made many anonymous contributions to a book of critical essays on eminent literary figures edited by him and entitled A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Within three years after her return to Wimpole Street she had many new poems in manuscript and others already published in journals, and she believed that the time was ripe for their appearance in book form-the first since The Seraphim and Other Poems of 1838. The critical reception of her Poems, published in two volumes in 1844, was such that the author was no longer merely a promising young poet but had suddenly become an international celebrity. On both sides of the Atlantic the leading journals came out with substantial reviews, and almost all found much to praise; Elizabeth Barrett was now acclaimed as one of England's great living poets.

None of the shorter poems caught the public fancy more than "Lady Geraldine's Courtship: A Romance of the Age." A young poet with slender financial resources falls in love with the daughter of an earl; but since her life is filled with luxuries, he has little hope that his love will be returned. Despite the social barriers, however, the romantic conclusion has the girl responding to her suitor's ardor. Another poem much admired by sentimental readers was "Bertha in the Lane." The heroine, though apparently in good health, dies suddenly after learning that her lover has jilted her in favor of her younger sister. The most influential poem in the volumes, and one of the best-known of all her works, was "The Cry of the Children," which had first appeared in Blackwood's a year earlier. Having read the reports from the parliamentary commissioners of the terrible conditions of children's employment in mines, trades, and manufactures, she tells of the hopeless lives of the boys and girls who are the victims of capitalist exploitation. Even though Barrett was a bookish, sheltered, upper middle-class unmarried woman far removed from the scenes she was describing, she gives evidence here of her passionate concern for human rights. The critics reviewing Poems praised her for her intellectual power, originality, and boldness of thought; but most agreed that her weakness lay in her frequent vagueness of concept and obscurity of expression.

The two volumes found their way into the home of Robert Browning. Upon seeing a handsome tribute paid to him by name in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." When Browning wrote that first of the many letters that were to be exchanged between the two poets, Barrett had already won an admiring public and was maintaining an extensive correspondence with writers and artists in England and the United States. Browning, on the other hand, was bitterly discouraged because his poetical career was not prospering and his productions on the London stage had proved to be hopeless failures. Six years younger than Barrett, he had abundant energy and good health, dressed as a young man of fashion, and enjoyed going to dinners and receptions where he conversed with many of the leading figures of the literary world. For almost all of his life he had been living at home with his parents and his sister-all three of whom adored him-and was financially dependent upon his father, since none of his volumes of verse had repaid the expenses of publication.

The courtship progressed despite the objections of Mr. Barrett, who wished his children to remain totally dependent on him. During the period of the exchange of letters and of Browning's visits to her room, she was composing the poems later to be named "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Among the finest love poems ever written, they are her most enduring poetic achievement. A chronic invalid, worn down by a succession of griefs, robbed of the bright-hued cheeks and resilience of youth, living without hope that a new life might someday be hers outside of her virtual prison, she expresses in the sonnets her sense of wonder that her life has been so transfigured. Filled with gratitude for her suitor's offer of love, she at first tells him that they must remain no more than friends because of the disparities in health and age. Marriage, she says, would place a severe burden upon him, for the care of an invalid wife six years older than he would necessarily take him away from the varied social life he has been enjoying. Will love that has come so quickly not fade just as quickly? Is her lover's suit based merely on pity? If she will promise to give up her home and the day-to-day associations with father, brothers, sisters, and friends, will he in turn be everything to her so that she will never miss the life she leaves behind? From the earnest look of her lover's eyes she finds the answers to these and other questions, so that her doubts and hesitations are dispelled. With the full assurance of the depth of his feelings for her, she responds to his love in the most inspired sonnet of the cycle, " How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

The clandestine marriage ceremony took place on September 12, 1846 at St. Marylebone Parish Church, which was not far from the Barretts' house. Almost immediately the couple left for Italy, where they hoped the warmer climate might help Elizabeth to regain some of her strength. After one winter they moved to Florence, which was to remain their home until Elizabeth's death. Despite the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood-their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen," was born in 1849-Barrett Browning had no intention of discontinuing her literary career. Her first task was to revise her volumes of 1838 and 1844 for publication in a new edition.

For the three years following her marriage Barrett Browning had kept the 44 sonnets in a notebook; she did not show them to her husband until the summer of 1849. He was so impressed with their beauty that he insisted on their appearing in her forthcoming new edition of Poems (1850). In order to make it appear that the poems had no biographical significance, the Brownings selected the ambiguous title "Sonnets from the Portuguese," as if they were translations. "Catarina to Camoens," the poem immediately preceding the sonnets in the second volume of Poems tells of the love of Catarina for the Portuguese poet Camoens. Since first reading "Catarina to Camoens" in Elizabeth's Poems of 1844, Browning had associated Elizabeth with the Portuguese Catarina. Most of the reviews of the Poems of 1850 paid little attention to the sonnets, but a writer in Fraser's magazine immediately appreciated their distinctive quality: "From the Portuguese they may be: but their life and earnestness must prove Barrett Browning either to be the most perfect of all known translators, or to have quickened with her own spirit the framework of another's thought, and then modestly declined the honour which was really her own." The sonnets gradually gained critical acceptance and have become the most beloved of all Barrett Browning's works.

Besides the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," the other major new work in the volumes was the retranslation of Prometheus Bound. This new version was an enormous improvement over the translation that had been published in 1833; it is faithful to the original without being pedantic and is expressed in lively, idiomatic English. The two volumes were fairly well received in England, where the reviewers praised her for the depth of her intellect, the earnestness of her thought, and the "pathetic beauty" of the romantic ballads. They believed, however, that Barrett Browning's poetry still retained some of the deficiencies of her earlier books, such as diffuseness, obscure language, and inappropriate imagery.

Barrett Browning had developed a passionate interest in Italian politics; during her first year in Italy she had written "A Meditation in Tuscany" and sent it to Blackwood's. The editor had declined it and returned the manuscript to her, and it became the first part of Casa Guidi Windows (1851). The poem deals with political events as seen by the poet from the windows of Casa Guidi, the great stone palace in Florence where the Brownings had an apartment. In 1846 the newly elected Pope Pius IX had granted amnesty to prisoners who had fought for Italian liberty, initiated a program looking forward to a more democratic form of government for the Papal State, and carried out a number of other reforms so that it looked as though he were heading toward the leadership of a league for a free Italy. Progressive measures had also been instituted in Tuscany by Grand Duke Leopold II, who arranged for a representative form of government and allowed the people to have a free press and to form their own civic guard. The first half of Casa Guidi Windows had been written when Barrett Browning was filled with enthusiasm and was hopeful that the newly awakened liberal movements were moving toward the unification and freedom of the Italian states.

In the second half of the poem she voices her disillusionment and her bitter disappointment that liberalism had been crushed almost everywhere in Italy. Pope Pius had fled in disguise from the Vatican in the face of agitation for a republican government and had taken refuge at Gaeta under the protection of the king of Naples. Leopold, whom Barrett Browning had at first admired, had proved to be a coward; and, rather than agree to the formation of a constituent assembly of the Italian states in Rome, he had left his Florentine palace and joined the exiled pope in Gaeta. Several months later the Austrian troops had occupied Florence, and Leopold had returned under their protection. In her poem Barrett Browning expresses her disappointment with the pope, the grand duke, the English government for its failure to intervene on the side of the Italian patriots, and the Florentines themselves because they had been unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices. By the middle of 1849 the liberal impulses had been crushed; except for Piedmont all the Italian states were under the domination of Austria and the papacy. For the next 10 years there were no more uprisings or wars, and in the absence of stirring political events Barrett Browning began the composition of a completely different kind of poem from anything she had written up to then.

As early as 1845 she had written to Browning that it was her intention to write a sort of novel-poem "running into the midst of our conventions, & rushing into drawing-rooms & the like 'where angels fear to tread'; & so, meeting face to face & without mask the Humanity of the age, & speaking the truth as I conceive of it, out plainly." For several years events in her own life and in the world about her distracted her from her purpose, so that the first mention of her new work appears in a letter written in 1853 to her friend Anna Jameson. Her poem would fill a volume when it was finished, she said; it was the romance she had been "hankering after so long, written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form." Named after the heroine of the poem, Aurora Leigh was published in 1857. In the dedication to her lifelong friend and benefactor John Kenyon she wrote that it was "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." In a narrative of some 11,000 lines the heroine tells of her birth in Italy, her early years in rural England, her successful literary career in London and later in Florence, and at the end her marriage to her one true love.

Orphaned at an early age and brought up by an aunt in the western county of Shropshire, the youthful Aurora finds herself in a cultural desert, with no one to share her enthusiasm for literature. Aurora's description of the kind of education imposed upon her by her conventional aunt illustrates the restricted, anti-intellectual attitudes of the English middle classes toward the upbringing of their daughters. Aurora memorizes the Collects of the Anglican Church, takes lessons in music and dancing, is given some superficial instruction in French, German, history, and geography, and is taught sewing and embroidery. Not only were young women discouraged from learning Greek and Latin and from reading "controversial" books, but they were denied a university education. Aurora has to seek her education at home, whereas her cousin Romney Leigh is sent to a university. Rebelling against her aunt's narrow regimen, Aurora finds her true life in the world of books. Discovering her father's private library hidden away in the attic, she reads widely in Greek and Latin literature and English poetry and begins to compose verses of her own.

At the age of 20 she rejects a proposal of marriage from Romney Leigh, who asks her to be his wife for the sole reason that he needs her to help him in his philanthropic activities. Women, he tells her, are lacking in the higher imaginative qualities that would enable them to be great writers or artists. Aurora moves away from the rural community which has so stifled her and makes her home in London, where she will be independent and strive for literary success. By dint of steady application she wins within six or seven years a place for herself in the London literary world. To help support herself she writes articles for encyclopedias and journals, but she finds her chief satisfaction in the publication of her volumes of poetry. The heroine of this novel-poem serves as Barrett Browning's mouthpiece when she declares that the most fitting subjects for poetry are to be found in contemporary settings and that a poet should not reject his own times to seek inspiration from earlier civilizations. Aurora, though still in her middle 20s, has already produced books of poetry which are reaching a wide and admiring public.

In contrast to Aurora, who has lived a serene and rather sheltered life, the main figure of the subplot is a pathetic victim of the abuses of society. Marian Erle is the only child of an ignorant and abusive migrant farm worker and a wife cowed into submission by his drunken rages. The girl runs away from her parents in fear of their violence, is rescued from destitution by Romney Leigh, and even receives from him an offer of marriage. As a radical socialist he thus proposes to put into practice his utopian ideal of the destruction of the barriers that separate the rich from the poor and the educated from the ignorant. The marriage, however, does not take place, for Marian is treacherously spirited away from England by a woman who believes herself to be in love with Romney. Marian is taken to a brothel in Paris, where she is drugged and sexually assaulted. As a result of this act of violence she becomes pregnant and after much ill-treatment gives birth to a son.

After nine years in London Aurora suddenly gives up her apartment and establishes a new home for herself in a villa in Florence. On the way she stops in Paris, where she encounters Marian and hears her story; she takes Marian and the baby to Florence with her. A few months after her arrival Aurora is asked once again by Romney to be his wife. This time, however, he is blind and much humbled by his misfortunes. Leigh Hall, which he had converted into a utopian community, had been set on fire and destroyed by the very people whom he had been aiding. At the time of the fire he had been struck on the forehead and blinded by a falling beam. Romney now sadly admits that doctrinaire socialism is a failure, for the people will rebel against any restrictions and reforms imposed upon them. Aurora says that she too has been wrong in her proud independence and her belief that her life could be complete without the companionship of a loved one. They pledge themselves to each other and look forward to a life of shared responsibilities. In the meanwhile Marian has told them that she will never marry and that when her child no longer needs her care she will devote herself to helping the "outcast orphans of the world."

In this long narrative poem Barrett Browning has dealt with some of the major social problems of her age. In Victorian England an educated woman with unusual talents had almost no opportunity to make use of her skills in a world that was dominated by men. Nevertheless, as the poem shows in the example of its heroine, it was possible for a woman with great energy and sense of purpose to live by herself in London and become renowned on the strength of her own unaided efforts. Professional success alone, however, is not sufficient, for nothing can give more meaning to a woman's life than enduring love in marriage. Another theme is Barrett Browning's distrust of the theories of contemporary French socialists, such as Charles Fourier, who advocated the division of society into communistic units. She believed that in the kind of state envisioned by the radical socialists there would be no place for artists and poets. Nothing stirred up more controversy than her frank treatment of the plight of "the fallen woman"-a subject that was considered by the Victorian public to be outside the purview of the serious novelist or poet. In mid-19th-century England standards of sexual conduct were so rigid that any woman who bore a child out of wedlock, even if she had been a victim of male aggression, was shunned by "respectable" people and condemned to a life of penance and mortification. One of Barrett Browning's most fundamental convictions was that sexual activity outside of marriage was immoral, but she believed that society should be more compassionate in its treatment of women who had been victims of sexual violence. It is not surprising that the story of Marian Erle shocked a number of women readers, some of whom were reported to have said that the reading of Aurora Leigh had endangered their morals.

Most of the Brownings' literary friends were delighted with the poem and accorded it the highest praise; Swinburne, , Walter Savage Landor, Ruskin, and the Rossetti brothers all spoke of it with unrestrained enthusiasm. From a commercial point of view it proved to be by far the most successful of Barrett Browning's works; by 1885, 28 years after its first publication, it had gone through 19 editions. Despite its great popularity with other poets and with the general public, it found little favor with professional reviewers.

Two years after the publication of Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning again became absorbed in current political events as the Italians, after a decade of truce, began once more their struggle for independence and unity. In response to these events Barrett Browning's Poems before Congress was published in the spring of 1860; seven of the eight poems deal with Italian politics, while the other, "A Curse for a Nation," is an antislavery poem that had earlier been published in an abolitionist journal in Boston. The notices in the leading English journals were uniformly unfavorable toward the volume, which they found offensive because of its strident tone and anti-British bias.

In the spring of 1860 Barrett Browning continued to write poems on the Italian situation, which to her great delight appeared to be moving toward a victorious outcome. Central and northern Italy had become a united kingdom under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont and his prime minister, Count Cavour. Besides her political poems, at this time she wrote "A Musical Instrument," which has become one of her best-known poems. Based on the myth of Pan and Syrinx, the verses exemplify the doctrine that the true poet is destined to suffer much hardship and pain in the practice of his art.

Despite her extreme frailty Barrett Browning followed with feverish excitement the rapidly unfolding events of the winter of 1860-1861. The peoples of Sicily, Naples, and the States of the Church had voted for annexation with Victor Emmanuel's new kingdom. With most of the Italian states united, a national parliament met at Turin early in 1861. Barrett Browning felt that her faith in the Italian leaders had been justified. "There are great men here, and there will be a great nation presently," she declared. She had been in poor health for several years, suffering from weakness of the lungs and heart, and her obsession with Italian politics further weakened her nervous system. The final blow, which prostrated her emotionally and physically, was the unexpected and premature death on June 6, 1861 of Count Cavour, the great patriot who had been chiefly responsible for bringing the disparate states into a unified and independent kingdom. "I can scarcely command voice or hand to name Cavour," Elizabeth wrote; "if tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine." For the next two weeks she remained in seclusion, never going out and seeing almost no one at home. Then on June 20, she was stricken with a severe cold, cough, and sore throat, and was confined to her bed; she died in Browning's arms early in the morning of June 29. Within a month Browning left Florence with his son to make his permanent home in London.

The many journals which reported Barrett Browning's untimely death all spoke of her as the greatest woman poet in English literature. The highly respected Edinburgh Review expressed the prevailing view when it said that she had no equal in the literary history of any country: "Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies has never been seen before in any woman." In America the most extravagant of the obituary notices appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, which called her "the Shakespeare among her sex" and placed her among the four or five greatest authors of all time. A year after her death Browning collected and arranged for publication her Last Poems, which included a number of translations from Greek and Latin poetry, personal lyrics, and poems on Italian politics. In the same year the fifth edition of her Poems was published. Both works were warmly received by the leading literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic as they reviewed her poetic career from its beginning and concluded that her gifts had been of the highest order. A writer in the Christian Examiner of Boston said that Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) and Barrett Browning' Aurora Leigh were the two greatest poems of the age and that the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" were the finest love poems in English: "Shakespeare's sonnets, beautiful as they are, cannot be compared with them, and Petrarch's seem commonplace beside them."

In the decades following Barrett Browning's death her poetry began to lose much of the appeal it had held for readers during her lifetime. The consensus of late-Victorian critics was that much of her writing would be forgotten in another generation but that she would be remembered for "The Cry of the Children," a few of the romantic ballads such as "Isobel's Child" and "Bertha in the Lane," and most of all for the "Sonnets from the Portuguese." During all this period and for the first three decades of the present century, Aurora Leigh largely dropped out of sight. In 1930, however, Virginia Woolf in an article in the Times Literary Supplement deplored the fact that Barrett Browning's poetry was no longer being read and especially that Aurora Leigh had been forgotten. She urged her readers to take a fresh look at the poem, which she admired for its "speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence." "Elizabeth Barrett," Mrs. Woolf wrote, "was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet." In Mrs. Woolf's view, the heroine of the poem," "with her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age."

Notwithstanding Mrs. Woolf's enthusiasm for Aurora Leigh, the poem continued to be ignored by the general public and by scholars until the recent advent of feminist criticism. None of Barrett Browning's poems has received more attention from feminist critics than Aurora Leigh, since its theme is one that especially concerns them: the difficulties that a woman must overcome if she is to achieve independence in a world mainly controlled by men. In Literary Women Ellen Moers writes that Aurora Leigh is the great epic poem of the age; it is "the epic poem of the literary woman herself." It now looks as though Barrett Browning's literary reputation will remain secure with future critics who view her work from a feminist perspective. One may also prophesy that for the general public the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," despite some Victorian quaintness of imagery, will continue to hold their place among the most-admired love poems of world literature.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Poetry Foundation

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Among all female poets of the English-speaking world in the 19th century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far...

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Teaching Kids Haiku with Kwame Alexander and TCM

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VideoLink lets you share videos on YouTube easily, without distracting third-party content or advertisements.

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Free verse is one of the simplest, and yet most difficult, type of poetry to write. While it doesn't constrict the poet with rules about form, it requires him or her to work hard at creating a piece that is beautiful and meaningful without any specific guidelines about rhyme and meter. If you'd like to try your hand at free verse, there are a few tips (not rules) that will help as you develop your own style.

Choosing Words Carefully

Carefully chosen words can help you create a poem that sounds like the situation, emotion, or object you are trying to portray. For instance, short words with sharp consonants cause the reader to stop-and- go in a choppy cadence: Cut, bash, stop, kick, lick, bite, punch, jump, stick, kiss. They almost sound like what they mean. Use these types of short words when you want to show excitement, fear, anger, new love, or anything that might make your heart beat quickly. Longer words with soft sounds cause the reader to slow down. Use them when you want to show pause, tension, laziness, rest.

Here is an example:

Thrill Ride
Up. Up.
Click, click.
Wind blows
sharp in my ears.
My heart jumps. Skips.
It's up. It's up higher.

It's up, up the highest.
Hands grasp at the clouds.

Then a forever pause. Still. Waiting.

Finally. Whoosh!
Steep drop
down,
down,
down.

Look how the short words move quickly as you read them. Then in the middle, the longer words at the top of the coaster, the pause before the drop, actually force your reading to slow and "forever pause." The repetition of the word "up" creates a jolting feeling. This is not the entire poem, as it still needs a punchy ending. How would you finish this poem?

Using Alliteration

Alliteration is a literary device where the first sound in a series of words is the same, like "She shares shining shells." You can use alliteration in free verse to create a particular mood, feeling, or sound to the poem, especially when combined with careful word choice. For example, the word "licking" forces your tongue to the front of your mouth when you say it, like a lick! Let's combine this careful word choice with alliteration in a free verse poem about a hard candy on a stick!

Summer Lollipop
Licking a lolly slowly,
sunlight lapping at the lazy lake.

Lovely evening,
lovely lolly,
lazy life.

You can almost feel yourself licking the lollipop slowly by the water with the sun setting on tiny ripples. Even though there is no set rhyme pattern or structure, you can almost feel a cadence in the words.

Using Personification

Sometimes giving an inanimate object human characteristics can breath new life into it. (See, I just did it!) Have you ever heard someone say that the sun was peeking out from somewhere, or that the clouds were lazy, or the water licked the shore? That's personification. Let's try it here:

Night crept in,
slow and smooth.

It smothered the city
in darkness.

Lights in windows
of tall buildings blinked,
One. Two. Again.

And opened
their bright eyes.

The night takes on the persona of a thief creeping through the darkness, and the lights blink their eyes. There are two different personifications working in this poem, bringing it to life.

Now that you have some tools, use them to create your own free verse. Once you write a few poems, you will begin to develop your very own unique style. Before you know it, you'll be writing free verse just like Walt Whitman!

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Free verse is one of the simplest, and yet most difficult, type of poetry to write. While it doesn't constrict the poet with rules about form, it requires him or her to work hard at creating a piece that is beautiful and meaningful without any specific guidelines about rhyme and meter.

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Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, she began writing at only a few years of age. Now her words have won her invitations to the Obama White House and to perform for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Gore, Secretary Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, and others. Amanda has performed multiple commissioned poems for CBS This Morning and she has spoken at events and venues across the country, including the Library of Congress and Lincoln Center. She has received a Genius Grant from OZY Media, as well as recognition from Scholastic Inc., YoungArts, the Glamour magazine College Women of the Year Awards, and the Webby Awards. She has written for the New York Times newsletter The Edit and penned the manifesto for Nike's 2020 Black History Month campaign. In 2017, Amanda Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word - a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States.

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Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

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By an amazing 7th grader!

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Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 - 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet. He was born in the town of Swansea. He published his first book of poetry in 1932. In addition to writing poetry, he was an excellent speaker. He toured the United Kingdom and the United States reciting his poems. He wrote works for radio including " A Child's Christmas in Wales" and " Under Milk Wood" Thomas is one of the famous people who appears on the cover of The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

Life and Career

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, the son of Florence Hannah ( née Williams; 1882-1958), a seamstress, and David John Thomas (1876-1952), a teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906-1953), who was eight years his senior. The children spoke only English, though their parents were bilingual in English and Welsh, and David Thomas gave Welsh lessons at home.

Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with these throughout his life. Thomas' formal education began at Mrs Hole's dame school, a private school on Mirador Crescent, a few streets away from his home.

In October 1925, Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant, where his father taught English. He was a pupil preferred reading. In his first year one of his poems was published in the school's magazine, and before he left he became its editor. During his final school years he began writing poetry in notebooks. In June 1928 Thomas won the school's mile race, held at St. Helen's Ground; he carried a newspaper photograph of his victory with him until his death. In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave 18 months later. Thomas continued to work as a freelance journalist for several years, during which time he continued to add to his notebooks, amassing 200 poems in four books between 1930 and 1934. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these years.

Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: "And death shall have no dominion", "Before I Knocked" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion" appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933. When "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender. They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934. The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin. In September 1935, Thomas met Vernon Watkins, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. Thomas introduced Watkins, working at Lloyds Bank at the time, to his friends, now known as The Kardomah Gang. In December 1935 Thomas contributed the poem "The Hand That Signed the Paper" to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse. In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. It was the time that Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.

In early 1936, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara (1913-1994), a 22-year-old blonde-haired, blue-eyed dancer of Irish descent. They met in The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End where Thomas proposed. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on 11 July 1937. In early 1938 they moved to Wales, renting a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939.

Wartime, 1939-1945

Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield, Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary, though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.

At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was worried about conscription, and referred to his ailment as "an unreliable lung". After initially seeking employment in a reserved occupation, he managed to be classified Grade III, which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. Thomas supplemented his income by writing scripts for the BBC, which not only gave him additional earnings but also provided evidence that he was engaged in essential war work.

In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was one of many streets that suffered badly; rows of shops, including the Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". Soon after the bombing raids, Thomas wrote a radio play, Return Journey Home, which described the café as being "razed to the snow". The play was first broadcast on 15 June 1947. The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war.

In May 1941, Thomas and Caitlin moved to London, leaving their son with his grandmother at Blashford in Hampshire. Thomas hoped to find employment in the film industry and wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of Information (MOI). After being rebuffed, he found work with Strand Films, providing him with his first regular income since the Daily Post. Strand produced films for the MOI; Thomas scripted at least five films in 1942, This Is Colour (a history of the British dyeing industry) and New Towns For Old (on post-war reconstruction). These Are The Men (1943) was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally. Conquest of a Germ (1944) explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis. Our Country (1945) was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry.

In March 1943 Caitlin gave birth to a daughter, Aeronwy, in London. They lived in a run-down studio in Chelsea, made up of a single large room with a curtain to separate the kitchen.

In 1944, with the threat of German flying bombs on London, Thomas moved to the family cottage at Blaen Cwm near Llangain, where Thomas resumed writing poetry, completing "Holy Spring" and "Vision and Prayer". In September Thomas and Caitlin moved to New Quay in Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), which inspired Thomas to pen the radio piece Quite Early One Morning, a sketch for his later work, Under Milk Wood. Of the poetry written at this time, of note is "Fern Hill", believed to have been started while living in New Quay, but completed at Blaen Cwm in mid-1945.

Broadcasting years 1945-1949

Although Thomas had previously written for the BBC, it was a minor and intermittent source of income. In 1943 he wrote and recorded a 15-minute talk entitled "Reminiscences of Childhood" for the Welsh BBC. In December 1944 he recorded Quite Early One Morning (produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies, again for the Welsh BBC) but when Davies offered it for national broadcast BBC London turned it down. On 31 August 1945 the BBC Home Service broadcast Quite Early One Morning, and in the three years beginning October 1945, Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation. Thomas was employed not only for his poetry readings, but for discussions and critiques.

By late September 1945 the Thomases had left Wales and were living with various friends in London. The publication of Deaths and Entrances in 1946 was a turning point for Thomas. Poet and critic Walter J. Turner commented in The Spectator, "This book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet".

In the second half of 1945, Thomas began reading for the BBC Radio programme, Book of Verse, broadcast weekly to the Far East. This provided Thomas with a regular income. Thomas remained a popular guest on radio talk shows for the BBC, who regarded him as "useful should a younger generation poet be needed".

Thomas visited the home of historian A. J. P. Taylor in Disley. Although Taylor disliked him intensely, he stayed for a month. In late 1946 Thomas turned up at the Taylors' again, this time homeless and with Caitlin. Margaret Taylor let them take up residence in the garden summerhouse.

In May 1949 Thomas and his family moved to his final home, the Boat House at Laugharne, purchased for him at a cost of £2,500 in April 1949 by Margaret Taylor. Thomas acquired a garage a hundred yards from the house on a cliff ledge which he turned into his writing shed, and where he wrote several of his most acclaimed poems. Just before moving into there, Thomas rented "Pelican House" opposite the Brown's Hotel, for his parents who lived there from 1949 until 1953. It was there that his father died and the funeral was held.

Caitlin gave birth to their third child, a boy named Colm Garan Hart, on 25 July 1949.

Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953 to undertake another tour of poetry-reading and talks, organised by Brinnin. Although he complained of chest trouble and gout while still in Britain, there is no record that he received medical treatment for either condition. On his last night in London he had a blckout in the company of his fellow poet Louis MacNeice. The next day he visited a doctor for a smallpox-vaccination certificate.

At midnight on 5 November Thomas's breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue. An ambulance was summoned.

Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent's Hospital at 1:58 am.

Thomas died at noon on 9 November, still in a coma.

Following his death, Thomas's body was brought back to Wales for burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne. Thomas's funeral took place at St Martin's Church in Laugharne on 24 November. Thomas's coffin was carried by six friends from the village. Caitlin, without her customary hat, walked behind the coffin, with his childhood friend Daniel Jones at her arm and her mother by her side. The procession to the church was filmed and the wake took place at Brown's Hotel. Thomas's obituary in The Times was written by fellow poet and long-time friend Vernon Watkins.

His widow, Caitlin, died in 1994 and was buried alongside him. Thomas's father "DJ" died on 16 December 1952 and his mother Florence in August 1958. Thomas's elder son, Llewelyn, died in 2000, his daughter, Aeronwy in 2009 and his youngest son Colm in 2012.

Poetic style

Thomas is viewed as part of the modernism and romanticism movements.

Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night". His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations.

Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity.

He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life. Thomas derived his images from the Bible, Welsh folklore, preaching, and Sigmund Freud.

Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance ... I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

Thomas was an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories. His first published prose work was After the Fair, printed in The New English Weekly on 15 March 1934. Thomas's fiction work can be classified into two main bodies, vigorous fantasies in a poetic style and, after 1939, more straightforward narratives.

Images for kids

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Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 - 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet. He was born in the town of Swansea. He published his first book of poetry in 1932. In addition to writing poetry, he was an excellent speaker.

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Read Alice Walker best poems: Alice Walker is an American poet and writer. Her first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland among other works. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled Poems of a Childhood Poetess.
Browse all poems and texts published on Alice Walker

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Alice Walker - Alice Walker Poems | Best Poems

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Read Alice Walker best poems: Alice Walker is an American poet and writer. Her first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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The following selections of poems are curated around specific themes and are appropriate for young readers.

Find poetry lesson plans, essays about teaching, a glossary of poetry terms, and other educator resources on our Materials for Teachers page. Visit our Poetry for Teens page to find more selections of poems tailored to a high school audience. Encourage students to participate in the Dear Poet project. And, celebrate Poem In Your Pocket Day virtually on April 30.

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Poems for Kids - The following selections of poems are curated around specific themes and are appropriate fo

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Jack Prelutsky is a creator of inventive poems for children and adults alike. He served as the Poetry Foundation's Children's Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008. Prelutsky grew up in the Bronx, and when he was young he studied classical music; though he decided to concentrate on writing instead of pursuing a career as an opera singer, he continues to sing.

In a Scholastic.com interview, when asked where his ideas come from, Prelutsky said, "Everywhere! Everything I see or hear can become a poem. Several toys in my studio have turned into poems. I remember things that happened when I was a kid ... Or I write about things I like or don't like. I love spaghetti and wrote a poem about it." Fabulous creatures and people inhabit his poems: the umbrellaphant, Uggs, and, in Scranimals (2002), banacondas, broccolions, and "the detested radishark."

He has written more than 70 children's books, often working with well-known illustrators such as Garth Williams, Arnold Lobel, and Marilyn Hafner. His poetry books include Stardines Swim High Across the Sky: and Other Poems (2013), The Swamps of Sleethe: Poems From Beyond the Solar System (2009), and Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face And Other Poems (2008). He has also edited collections of poetry for children, including The 20th Century Children's Poetry Treasury (1999).

Prelutsky lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife, Carolyn.

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Jack Prelutsky is a creator of inventive poems for children and adults alike. He served as the Poetry Foundation's Children's Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008. Prelutsky grew up in the Bronx, and when he was young he studied classical music; though he decided to concentrate on writing instead of...

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I like how it proved that you can do anything someone else can.

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The Greatest Poet You've Never Heard (Is 12 Yrs Old)

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This is the full transcript of Grand Slam Poetry Champion Harry Baker's TED Talk titled 'A love poem for lonely prime numbers'.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Grand Slam Poetry Champion by Harry Baker at TEDxExeter Harry Baker - Poet
My name is Harry Baker Harry Baker is my name. If your name was Harry Baker, then our names would be the same. It's a short introductory part.

Yeah, I'm Harry. I study maths. I write poetry. So I thought I'd start with a love poem about prime numbers. This is called "59." I was going to call it "Prime Time Loving." That reaction is why I didn't. So, "59."
59 wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. Realizes all his hair is on one side of his head. Takes just under a minute to work out that It's because of the way that he slept. He finds some clothes and gets dressed. He can't help but look in the mirror and be subtly impressed How he looks rough around the edges and yet casually messed. And as he glances out the window, he sees the sight that he gets blessed with of 60 from across the street. Now 60 was beautiful. With perfectly trimmed cuticles, dressed in something suitable. Never rude or crude at all. Unimprovable, right on time as usual, more on cue than a snooker ball But liked to play it super cool. 59 wanted to tell her that he knew her favorite flower. He thought of her every second, every minute, every hour. But he knew it wouldn't work, he'd never get the girl. Because although she lived across the street they came from different worlds. While 59 admired 60's perfectly round figure, 60 thought 59 was odd. One of his favorite films was "101 Dalmatians." She preferred the sequel. He romanticized the idea they were star-crossed lovers. They could overcome the odds and evens because they had each other. While she maintained the strict views imposed on her by her mother That separate could not be equal. And though at the time he felt stupid and dumb For trying to love a girl controlled by her stupid mum, He should have been comforted by the simple sum. Take 59 away from 60, and you're left with the one. Sure enough after two months of moping around, 61 days later, 61 was who he found, He had lost his keys and his parents were out. So one day after school he went into a house As he noticed the slightly wonky numbers on the door, He wondered why he'd never introduced himself before, As she let him in, his jaw dropped in awe. 61 was like 60, but a little bit more. She had prettier eyes, and an approachable smile, And like him, rough around the edges, casual style, And like him, everything was in disorganized piles, And like him, her mum didn't mind if friends stayed a while. Because she was like him, and he liked her. He reckoned she would like him if she knew he was like her, And it was different this time. I mean, this girl was wicked, So he plucked up the courage and asked for her digits. She said, "I'm 61." He grinned, said, "I'm 59." Today I've had a really nice time, So tomorrow if you wanted you could come over to mine? She said, "Sure." She loved talking to someone just as quirky, She agreed to this unofficial first date. In the end he was only ready one minute early, But it didn't matter because she arrived one minute late. And from that moment on there was nonstop chatter, How they loved "X Factor," how they had two factors, How that did not matter, distinctiveness made them better, By the end of the night they knew they were meant together. And one day she was talking about stuck-up 60, She noticed that 59 looked a bit shifty.

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Grand Slam Poetry Champion Harry Baker at TEDxExeter (Full Transcript)

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This is the full transcript of Grand Slam Poetry Champion Harry Baker's TED Talk titled 'A love poem for lonely prime numbers'. Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Grand Slam Poetry Champion by Harry Baker at TEDxExeter Harry Baker - Poet My name is Harry Baker Harry Baker is my name.

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Dear Basketball,

From the moment
I started rolling my dad's tube socks
And shooting imaginary
Game-winning shots
In the Great Western Forum
I knew one thing was real:

I fell in love with you.
A love so deep I gave you my all
From my mind & body
To my spirit & soul.

As a six-year-old boy
Deeply in love with you
I never saw the end of the tunnel.
I only saw myself
Running out of one.

And so I ran.
I ran up and down every court
After every loose ball for you.
You asked for my hustle
I gave you my heart
Because it came with so much more.

I played through the sweat and hurt
Not because challenge called me
But because YOU called me.
I did everything for YOU
Because that's what you do
When someone makes you feel as
Alive as you've made me feel.

You gave a six-year-old boy his Laker dream
And I'll always love you for it.
But I can't love you obsessively for much longer.
This season is all I have left to give.
My heart can take the pounding
My mind can handle the grind
But my body knows it's time to say goodbye.
And that's OK.

I'm ready to let you go.
I want you to know now
So we both can savor every moment we have left together.
The good and the bad.
We have given each other
All that we have.

And we both know, no matter what I do next
I'll always be that kid
With the rolled up socks
Garbage can in the corner
:05 seconds on the clock
Ball in my hands.
5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1
Love you always,
Kobe

The Legacy

In 2007, the Bryants launched the VIVO Foundation - now known as the Kobe & Vanessa Bryant Family Foundation (KVVFF). Their goal is to provide young people with life-changing experiences designed to broaden their global perspectives. Through this initiative, Kobe and Vanessa have sponsored international enrichment experiences for minority college students and provided domestic and international youth scholarships for the Kobe Bryant Basketball Academy.

The foundation strives to encourage young people to stay active through sports. It provides financial resources, develops distinctive programs and raises awareness for relevant issues in order to strengthen communities through educational and cultural enrichment opportunities.

KVBFF also operates Mamba FC, a youth soccer club in Orange County, California. Per their mission statement:

We teach our young athletes how to become leaders and independent thinkers, while working together as a group to achieve a common goal through health and fitness.
http://mambafc.com/

The KVBFF is passionate about eradicating youth homelessness. To accomplish this goal, they partnered with a number of Los Angeles-based organizations including Step Up on Second, My Friend's Place and United Way.

As we remember Kobe Bryant, our first thought is his basketball career. That career afforded him the opportunity to effect change by improving the lives of the underserved.

How Can You Continue Kobe's Legacy

If you are a nonprofit that caters to youth and in particular youth in sports, you may fund your organization through grants. GrantWatch has several hundred grants listed in the Sport and Recreation category. If you are a for-profit company, try doing a grant search on GrantWatch.com

The moment you give up, is the moment you let someone else win.
Kobe Bryant

RIP Kobe⛹️‍♂️
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/dear-basketball

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Dear Basketball - A Poem by Kobe Bryant Latest

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Dear Basketball - A Poem by Kobe Bryant written upon his retirement from playing basketball for the Lakers

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"Somewhere
In the Northwest region of Seattle Washington
There's a homeless man, armed with a beer can
Trying to drink away war memories
Waiting for someone
Self-less enough to lend him an ear
He sits on the side of a Pizzeria on the corner of Queen Ann and Mercer
In a chair, they probably kick him out of after business hours
His skin
Has grown all too fond of the concrete beds that he rest his shell-shocked head on
His braggadocios body
rocks back and forth showing off to the world the only gifts war veterans ever receive
He addresses me, "Ey lil Bra, you got a dollar?"
Without even checkin my pockets I tell him, "I aint got it".
Having anticipated this appointment he responds with,
"That's fine, cause I really wanted a 20."
Amazed, not that he still knows what humor is,

but that is one of the few possessions that the war actually let him keep, I laugh
Before digging into my coat pocket filled with a ton of change I'll probably never use
He lets me know that more than a 20, what he really wanted was a conversation
And takes my 75 cent donation as an invitation to start one
Without offering much space for me to converse,

he lets me know how in this country,
war veterans are rarely anything more
Than patriotic flies on a wall
And that for all these people to ignore his request
Is just as second nature as swatting at a pest
I guess
None of them realize that here lie their tax dollars at work
His body jerks
To the percussion of his bones
Dancing to the song of post-traumatic stress syndrome
How wrong
Is it of humans to lack humanity
Demanding he keep his lips locked but
Possess the audacity to ask where he got his army cap on
To think it's a trigger you can purchase at a gift shop he tells me
That they've labeled him as crazy and they say

he has to take medicine called percadine but the one time he took it
It made him high so why would he continue when it makes his mind worse with time
It seems like the perfect crime
Having people fight for a country that won't fight for them
The goal
Was for one of those countries to take his life from him
And the opposing country failed when he
Returned to civilization but
The home country would succeed by stripping him of his home
How long
Will this be the standard in this country?
Where if war doesn't kill you
They distill you
Sending you back home just to rot and mildew
the phrase
"War is good for absolutely nothing", is still true
Before he lets me go,
he tells me
that he wants to die.
And I see the tear-shaped white flag surrender from his eye
I give him a pound
Before digging back into my coat pockets surrendering

the rest of the change I found.
I tell him I have to go
Cause there's a white man, screaming at me through traffic
Waiting for me to end this conversation
There's a young lady at a bar and grill across the street
Waiting for me to join her for dinner
And there's a poem
Scratching at the insides of my soul
Waiting for me
To tell this story."

Copyright Lamar Jorden

Published by

Yecheilyah

I write Black Historical Fiction, Poetry, and Inspirational Non-Fiction for the Freedom of all People. Visit me on the web at yecheilyahysrayl.com/ View all posts by Yecheilyah

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Guest Feature: Waiting for Someone - Lamar Jorden

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCgfW5d8COs "Somewhere In the Northwest region of Seattle Washington There's a homeless man, armed with a beer can Trying to drink away war memories Waiting for someone Self-less enough to lend him an ear He sits on the side of a Pizzeria on the corner of Queen Ann and Mercer In a chair, they probably...

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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by Student, A.

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What is a Limerick?

Limericks are one of the most fun and well-known poetic forms. No one knows for sure where the name "limerick" comes from, but most people assume it is related to the county of Limerick, in Ireland.

The reason limericks are so much fun is because they are short, rhyming, funny, and have a bouncy rhythm that makes them easy to memorize. In this lesson, I'll show you how you can write your own limericks in just a few easy steps.

The Rules of Limericks

Limericks, like all poetic forms, have a set of rules that you need to follow. The rules for a limerick are fairly simple:

They are five lines long.

Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme with one another.

Lines 3 and 4 rhyme with each other.

They have a distinctive rhythm (which I'll explain shortly)

They are usually funny.

Rhyming a Limerick

The rhyme scheme of a limerick is known as "AABBA." This is because the last words in lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme. Those are the "A's" in the rhyme scheme. The "B's" are the last words of lines 3 and 4. Let me give you an example:

There was a young fellow named Hall
Who fell in the spring in the fall.
'Twould have been a sad thing
Had he died in the spring,
But he didn't-he died in the fall.

- Anonymous

Notice that the words, "Hall," "fall," and "fall" all rhyme. Those are the "A" words in the "AABBA" rhyme scheme. Also notice that "thing" and "spring" rhyme. Those are the "B" words in the rhyme scheme.

Limerick Rhythm

Now let's take a look at the rhythm of the limerick. It goes by the complicated name "anapaestic," but you don't need to worry about that. What I want you to notice when you read or recite a limerick is that the first two lines and the last line have three "beats" in them, while the third and fourth lines have two "beats." In other words, the rhythm of a limerick looks like this:

The rhythm doesn't have to exactly match this, but it needs to be close enough that it sounds the same when you read it. For example, using the limerick above about the fellow from Hall, if we emphasize the beats, it reads like this:

Let's take a look at another famous limerick:

There was an old man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket;
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

- Anonymous

If you emphasize the beats when you read it, it comes out like this:

Some Limerick Tricks

There are two more things that you will notice when you read limericks:

1. The first line usually ends with a person's first name or the name of a place.

2. The last line is usually funny.

Because the first line is usually the name of a person or place, writing the first line is the easiest part. You simply pick the name of a place or person - like "New York" or "Dave" - and write a line like this:

There once was a man from New York

Or

There was an old woman named Dave

Then go to your rhyming dictionary and start looking for rhymes like "cork," "fork," "pork," "stork," or "cave," "gave," "wave," and so on to find more words to complete your limerick.

Once you've found some rhyming words, you'll want to start thinking about a funny ending for your poem. I find it's easiest to write lines 1, 2, and 5 first, and then to fill in lines 3 and 4 afterward. For example, I decided to write a limerick about someone from Seattle, so I started it like this:

A talkative man from Seattle
would spend his days speaking to cattle.

I then noticed that the word "prattle" rhymed with "cattle" and "Seattle" so I wrote the last line, like this:

She said, "Why it's nothing but prattle!"

Finally, I went back and wrote lines 3 and 4 to complete the limerick:

You'll notice that I changed the last line after I wrote lines 3 and 4. I did this so the poem would make more sense. It's okay to change your words at any time if it improves the poem.

Your Turn

Now it's your turn to see if you can write a limerick of your own. Remember to follow these steps:

1. Choose the name of a person or place and write the first line.

2. Look in a rhyming dictionary for words that rhyme with your person or place name.

3. Write line 2 and 5 to rhyme with the first line.

4. Now write lines 3 and 4 with a different rhyme.

When you are done writing, read your limerick out loud to see if it has the right rhythm; three "beats" on lines 1, 2, and 5, and two "beats" on lines 3 and 4, as shown above. If not, see if you can rewrite some words to get the rhythm right.

Limericks Take Practice

I know that writing limericks is going to seem hard at first because it's sometimes difficult to get the rhythm, the rhymes, and the joke to all work together. But don't worry; with a little practice, you'll soon be creating funny limericks of your own that will make your friends and family laugh. Have fun!

Worksheet

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Limericks are one of the most fun and well-known poetic forms. No one knows for sure where the name "limerick" comes from, but most people assume it is related to the county of Limerick, in Ireland. The reason limericks are so much fun is because they are short, rhyming, funny, and have a bouncy rhythm that makes them easy to memorize.

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Couplet poems, or couplet poetry are comprised of two rhyming lines of verse. They can be as short as one couplet (two lines), or as long as it takes to tell the poem.

GOOSE AND MOOSE
It's hard to tell just what a goose
will have in common with a moose.
Or better yet, just what three geese
will have in common with three meese.
(Is that the plural for a mouse?
Is grice the plural for three grouse?)
I'll say this once, I'll say this thrice,
the plural for a moose is mice,
or plural for three mice is meeses.
I think that I may fall to pieces.
I feel my dizzy state increase
about the mice, the grice and geese.

GOOSE AND MOOSE is a multi-line couplet poem (12 lines, six couplets). It is a fun play on words. Words are an inexpensive, and extremely fun play thing.

Two-Line Couplet Poetry

SILLY SALLY
When Silly Sally irons her clothes, they come out looking awful.
She did not read the label and her iron was meant to waffle.

Poem and Art by Denise Rodgers
Copyright © Denise Rodgers

You could break up the two lines into four (as it was done in my first poetry book, A LITTLE BIT OF NONSENSE), but in essence, this poem and the next both are two-line couplets. Sudden Baldness, the second example, below, is on the same page in theNonsense book.

SUDDEN BALDNESS
"Oh my!" the portly gent called out. "I cannot find my hair.
I washed and put it out to dry, and now it isn't there!"

Poem and Art by Denise Rodgers
Copyright © Denise Rodgers

Multiple-Line Couplet Poems

My personal classic, Slicing Salami, in on page eight ofA LITTLE BIT OF NONSENSE. It's my personal classic because it was first published in The 20th Century Children's Poetry Treasury, Random House , BEFORE it was published in my own book. Quite an honor!

SLICING SALAMI
The strangest strange stranger I've me in my life
was the man who made use of his nose as a knife.
He's slice up salami, tomatoes and cheese
at the tip of his nose with phenomenal ease.

He'd buy food in bulk at incredible prices
and then use his nose to reduce it to slices.
His wife ran away and I know that he'll miss her.
The woman was frightened that one day he'd kiss her!

See more couplet poems here:

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Couplet poems, or couplet poetry are comprised of two rhyming lines of verse. They can be as short as one couplet (two lines), or as long as it takes to tell the poem.

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Waterfalls, gleaming
from the sun as the water
falls and falls and falls...

Each casting rainbows
from beneath; the imagery
unfolding - slowly...

Bringing emotions
to all in many different
ways to all people.

Falling with freedom,
shining brightly, falling down
peacefully; calmly...

With beauty all over,
all around; we go into
question; how? they ask.

Peacefully, we all
stand together, looking all
around... up and down

Looking around, all
of us see that what's in front
of us is shinning,

Slowly unfolding,
turning beautiful, we
all understand that

Nature is the
one thing we can never miss
so see it unfold.

Beauty waits
-Mason Smith

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Kids Learn Ingredients of a Poem with Kwame Alexander and TCM

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Ah, the dog days of summer...

Is your family hot and cranky? Crammed together in a car for the long ride home? Has boredom set in, despite the thousands of Pokémon still at large?

The perfect antidote, dear readers, is this six-hour playlist of poet and musician Shel Silverstein's best loved work. If you need Spotify, download it here.

Uncle Shelby himself kicks things off with an invitation to all dreamers, wishers, liars, hopers, pray-ers, magic-bean-buyers, and pretenders.

That net seems sufficiently wide to encompass just about everyone, even (especially!) the sullen teen who wasn't allowed to stay home by him or herself.

Silverstein did not subscribe to the dry narrative style that E.B.White used to such great effect on the audiobook of Charlotte's Web.

Instead, he cracks himself up, hissing, yipping and howling his way through Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. A veteran of Off-Broadway and the author of over a hundred one-act plays, Silverstein clearly relished performing his own work.

(As evidence, we submit "Warning," an instructional poem concerning the sharp-toothed snail dwelling inside every human nose.)

His unhinged gusto is doubly pleasing when one recalls the attempts to ban his work from libraries and elementary schools due to the presence of demons, devils, ghosts, and a manipulative little girl who makes good on her threat to die if her parents won't buy her a pony.

The back end of the playlist is a testament to the poet's musical abilities. Perhaps the best known song in his massive catalog is Johnny Cash's hit "A Boy Named Sue," above. In addition to Cash and Silverstein's own hoarse tenor, you'll encounter the likes of Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare and longtime Silverstein collaborator Dr. Hook.

My only regret is the absence of my personal favorite Silverstein poem ...it seems unlikely that such a track exists, but I do love imagining the havoc it could wreak in the family car. Children, don't forget your eggs.
Related Content: Six Animations of Stories and Poems by Shel Silverstein Shel Silverstein Narrates an Animated Version of The Giving Tree (1973) Studs Terkel Interviews Bob Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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A Six-Hour Playlist of Shel Silverstein's Poems & Songs: Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic & More

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Ah, the dog days of summer... Is your family hot and cranky? Crammed together in a car for the long ride home? Has boredom set in, despite the thousands of Pokémon still at large? The perfect antidote, dear readers, is this six-hour playlist of poet and musician Shel Silverstein's best loved work.

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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How many syllables in slippery?

Divide slippery into syllables: slip-per-y
Stressed syllable in slippery:
How to say slippery: Hear syllable in slippery

Cite This Source

Syllable Quiz

Are you smarter than a
3rd grader?

You can win $250 for your students.

Prize awarded to a teacher each month.

Flower has 2 syllables.
Flour only has 1 syllable!

How many syllables
are in LOL?

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Divide slippery into syllables: slip-per-y Stressed syllable in slippery: How to say slippery: Hear syllable in slippery Cite This Source Syllable Quiz Are you smarter than a3rd grader? You can win $250 for your students. Prize awarded to a teacher each month. Flower has 2 syllables. Flour only has 1 syllable!

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Students hussling in the hallway while
Catching up with friends.
Hi, how are you, I hear in echo, echo
Our halls are always packed.
Outside is where I want to be
Laying on the ground; looking at the clouds.

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Teach Kids Poetry together with Kwame Alexander and TCM

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[ Introduction] [ Printable Worksheets] [ Example]

A syllable is a part of a word pronounced as a unit. It is usually made up of a vowel alone or a vowel with one or more consonants. The word "Sonnet" has two syllables: Son-net; the word "introduction" has four syllables: in-tro-duc-tion.

English Sonnets are a form of poetry that was created during the renaissance. English sonnets consist of 14 lines; three, four line stanzas accompanied by a two line closing stanza. The rhyming scheme for an English Sonnet is:

This means that the first and third lines of each four line stanza rhyme and the second and fourth lines of each four line stanza rhyme. The two lines of the closing stanza should rhyme as well.

Each line of the stanza should have no more and no less than ten syllables.

Example of a sonnet:

Isolation quickly overwhelms me
Begging for forgiveness, a fallen hand
Desolation I now begin to see
Hanging by a thin thread, a single strand

I watch them... Their fears, their misbehaviour
Mistreat, abuse.... Completely unaware
I am the land, their glorious saviour
Someday they will learn to treat me with care

I wish they would learn to trust each other
To join as one, to stand strong together
A bond, a band and a mighty brother
Forever as one, a powerful tether

You may not know, that fear is their captor
So you may not see each special factor

Worksheet 1: Information about sonnets and an example.

Worksheet 2: Information about sonnets and room to write your own.

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Introduction] [ Printable Worksheets] [ Example] A syllable is a part of a word pronounced as a unit. It is usually made up of a vowel alone or a vowel with one or more consonants. The word "Sonnet" has two syllables: Son-net; the word "introduction" has four syllables: in-tro-duc-tion.

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Leaves on a fall tree
Flutter like a Butterfly
as they fall downwards

As everyone knows,
fall is the most colorful
time of the long year

But Evergreen trees;
Everyone knows why these trees
stand out unlike others

With the leaves all green
all year around, Evergreens
never seem gloomy

They may not have leaves
like other trees, red, yellow,
orange, and much more

But they are my most
favorite kind of trees out
of all trees, always...

-Mason S

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But Why answered your questions live on air on Friday, May 15.

We talked about poetry and writing with Poetry Guy Ted Scheu, Rajnii Eddins, and heard your poems! Get your pencils ready; we included some fun writing exercises as well. We also heard from Iris Robert of the Young Writer's Project who has her own podcast called Line Break.
TRANSCRIPT
This program is part of a collaboration with the Vermont Agency of Education to bring interactive educational opportunities to students while schools are closed.
Supplemental Resources from the Vermont Agency of Education
Loading...

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But Why answered your questions live on air on Friday, May 15. We talked about poetry and writing with Poetry Guy Ted Scheu, Rajnii Eddins, and heard your poems! Get your pencils ready; we included some fun writing exercises as well.

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I love waterfalls
and the way they shine like stars
by the horizon

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Drop the puck now
Skates cracking slippery ice
sticks wacking the puck

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Eighteen years ago today, Shel Silverstein, also known as Uncle Shelby, also known as the writer who introduced a generation (or two) of current adults to poetry, died at the age of 67. Of course Silverstein did much more than simply write poems for children-he was also a songwriter, screenwriter, cartoonist, and general creative jack-of-all trades. As our friend Otto Penzler once put it,

[H]is whimsically hip fables, beloved by readers of all ages, have made him a stalwart of bestseller lists. A Light in the Attic, most remarkably, showed the kind of staying power on the New York Times chart-two years, to be precise- thought that most of the biggest names (John Grisham, Stephen King and Michael Crichton) have never equaled with their blockbusters. His unmistakable illustrative style is another crucial element to his appeal. Just as no writer sounds like Shel, no other artist's vision is as delightfully, sophisticatingly cockeyed.

To celebrate Silverstein's life and his most enduring contribution to all of ours, I've put together a brief (and obviously incomplete) survey of great children's poets, starting, of course, with the man himself.
Shel Silverstein
Here's something you may not know about Shel Silverstein: he hung out at the Playboy Mansion. Like, a lot. In the late '50s and '60s, Silverstein was a regular contributor to Playboy as a cartoonist, and his work continued to appear until his death (and one piece was published posthumously). According to this (faintly horrifying, but informative) remembrance:

As part of Hef's inner circle and one of its court jesters, Silverstein might spend weeks or months at a time at the infamous party pad, where he tended to lurk in the background and let others come to him. Silverstein had no patience for bores . . . but he fed creatively off the many interesting people and encounters he had in the Playboy world-and he wrote many of his children's works while inside it. As playwright David Mamet told The New York Times after Silverstein's death: "He was Hugh Hefner's sidekick, he was the great cartoonist, he lived with Hef at the Playboy Mansion, in a riot of delight."

Happily, he was the court jester for more than just the Playboy Mansion. His books of poetry-in particular 1974's Where the Sidewalk Ends-are widely recognized as classics of children's literature. But of course, like all the best works of art for children, adults can find much within for themselves. Here's one of my favorites, including Silverstein's original illustration:

Naomi Shihab Nye
Like Silverstein, Naomi Shihab Nye does a little bit of everything-she writes poems for both adults and children, picture books, short stories and YA novels, as well as songs. In Contemporary Women Poets, poet Paul Christensen noted that she "is building a reputation . . . as the voice of childhood in America, the voice of the girl at the age of daring exploration." A fitting description for a poet who is the daughter of an American mother and a father who was a Palestinian refugee, who consistently represents both strands of her heritage and the ways they intertwine.

In 2012, Nye was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. In her nominating statement, juror Ibtisam Barakat wrote that "Naomi's incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone's world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem...Naomi's poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights into poems that ache like a shore pacing in ebb and flow, expecting the arrival of meaning."

Here's a poem from A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, entitled "Mystery":

When I was two
I said to my mother
I don't like you, but I like you.

She laughed a long time.

I will spend the rest of my life
trying to figure this out.
Edward Lear
I suppose now is the time that I should give up telling you how each one of these children's poets was actually excellent in a variety of fields-it seems to be one of the things they have universally in common. Like Silverstein, Lear often illustrated his own poems. But Lear was also an accomplished wildlife illustrator, whom David Attenborough called "probably the best ornithological illustrator that ever was," and a composer who was known for the works of Tennyson he set to music.

But more importantly for the purposes of this list, Lear is more or less the reason you and all of your friends know about limericks. In 1846, Lear put literary nonsense on the map with A Book of Nonsense-with three follow-up volumes-and is one of the most famous purveyors of absurd poetry and luscious neologisms. And as Poetry puts it, "the limerick protagonists provided for the didactically surfeited Victorian child examples of bizarre, misbehaving adults, with no blatant moralizing attached." Two charmers from A Book of Nonsense are below, but find many more here:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'

There was a Young Lady of Clare,
Who was sadly pursued by a bear;
When she found she was tired,
She abruptly expired,
That unfortunate Lady of Clare.
Francisco X. Alarcón
Alarcón decided to begin writing poems for children in the 1990s, when he "became aware that there were almost no books of bilingual poems children written by any Latino poet in the United States," and decided to write his own collection, entitled Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems. Alarcón's poems for children are minimalist and airy, and often presented in bilingual editions-having been raised in both the US and Mexico, he wrote in English, Spanish and Nahuatl, and he described himself as a "binational, bicultural, and a bilingual writer." He also taught poetry to children, and said that "children from the third grade to the sixth grade are truly excellent natural poets," which seems irrefutably true. Here's his "Ode to My Shoes" from the collection Bellybutton of the Moon:
Jacqueline Woodson
The highly-lauded Woodson is a contemporary master of children's literature, probably most famous for her young adult novels, but skilled in writing for children, adolescents, and adults. Her two most recent works of literature for children are narratives in verse, including Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir-in-verse that won the National Book Award for young people's literature in 2014. She's currently finishing up a two-year term as the Poetry Foundation's young people's poet laureate -in an interview at the time of her appointment, she said:

I think one thing I want to do as young people's poet laureate is make sure all people know that poetry is a party everyone is invited to. I think many people believe and want others to believe that poetry is for the precious, entitled, educated few. And that's just not true. Our children's first words are poems-poems we and our listeners are delighted to hear and eager to understand. Rap is poetry. Spoken word is poetry. Poetry lives in our everyday. I've read some of the most poetic tweets, listened to poetic voice messages and snippets of dialogue between teenagers.

To which I have to say: four more years. Here's a poem from Brown Girl Dreaming, entitled "Reading":

I am not my sister.
Words from the books curl around each other
make little sense
until
I read them again
and again, the story
settling into memory. Too slow
the teacher says.
Read faster.
Too babyish, the teacher says.
Read older.
But I don't want to read faster or older or
any way else that might
make the story disappear too quickly
from where it's settling
inside my brain,
slowly becoming
a part of me.
A story I will remember
long after I've read it for the second,
third, tenth,
hundredth time.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Perhaps you have heard of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of classics like Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde>? Well, he also wrote a much-beloved 1885 collection of poems for children entitled A Child's Garden of Verses, that has gone through countless editions and hands. Some argue that the darkness in some of the poems is reflective of Stevenson's sickly childhood. Here's a classic from the collection, entitled "My Shadow":
Nikki Giovanni
The highly prolific Giovanni came to prominence in the '60s as part of the Black Arts Movement and remains one of our most important American poets. (She's also written picture books and essay collections.) All of her work directly addresses the African American experience, making her voice a particularly vital one in children's literature. She published her first book of poetry for children, Spin a Soft Black Song, in 1971, and 2008's Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, which included a CD of poetry performances, was a New York Times bestseller. From her poem "Ego-tripping" (read the rest here):

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me
Paul Fleischman
Fleischman is yet another highly prolific writer who has published is almost every category you can name-novels, picture books, YA, short stories, nonfiction, plays-but he is best known for his collection Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, which won the 1989 Newbery Medal. The book is a classic because it-rather unusually-invites cooperation in its own consumption, having been written expressly to be read aloud by two people, in part to reflect the "booming/boisterous/joyful noise" of insects, on which these poems focus. For instance:
Judith Viorst
You probably know Viorst as the author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and of course she is, but she is also the author of a pair of delightful books of "poems for children and their parents": If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries and Sad Underwear and Other Complications. I mean really, the titles alone-not to mention the wisdoms for kids of all ages:

If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn't have lonely.
You wouldn't have clean.
You wouldn't have bedtimes.
Or "Don't punch your sister."
You wouldn't even have sisters.

If I were in charge of the world
A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable
All 007 movies would be G,
And a person who sometimes forgot to brush,
And sometimes forgot to flush,
Would still be allowed to be
In charge of the world.
Roald Dahl
Well, of course. The weirdo king of kiddie lit also wrote and published poems, including his famous Revolting Rhymes, a collection of six fairy-tale retellings in verse form. Only they're not straightforward retellings, of course. Much like Anne Sexton (and much unlike her), he has his own ideas about how these tales should be told. For instance, this section, from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs":

For ten whole years the silly Queen
Repeated this absurd routine
Then suddenly, one awful day
She heard the Magic Mirror say
"From now on Queen, you're number two
Snow-White is prettier than you."
The Queen went absolutely wild
She yelled, "I'm going to scrag that child."
"I'll cook her flaming goose, I'll skin her
I'll have her rotten guts for dinner."
She called the Huntsman to her study
She shouted at him, "Listen, buddy,
You drag that filthy girl outside
And see you take her for a ride
Thereafter slit her ribs apart
And bring me back her bleeding heart."

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10 Wonderful Children's Poets You Should Know

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Eighteen years ago today, Shel Silverstein, also known as Uncle Shelby, also known as the writer who introduced a generation (or two) of current adults to poetry, died at the age of 67. Of course S...

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm by Mrs. Richards

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm by Mrs. Richards

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Why is it bad luck
to open up umbrellas
inside? Confusing.

You need to open
it inside if you don't want
to get wet outside.

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Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

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Read Poetry is an online community where we celebrate poetry around the world and encourage readers to discover poetry that speaks to them.

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

For National Poetry Month, we sail in a sieve to the land of poetry, with author Kyle Lukoff. Kyle just released a picture book titled, "Explosion at the Poem Factory." Kyle shares the story about the good bad poem that inspired his book, you'll also learn about the Philolexian Society he belonged that each year hosts a bad poetry festival each year...and he shares the secret of what makes a bad poem..good. And as always, a few Buttons & Figs kids share their good bad poems to show us the way to wordplay...Now go write a poem! www.buttonsandfigs.com

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a podcast for kids about playing with words

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#49 - Poem Explosion with author Kyle Lukoff

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For National Poetry Month, we sail in a sieve to the land of poetry, with author Kyle Lukoff. Kyle just released a picture book titled, "Explosion at the Poem Factory."