Understanding poetry is an important skill for students to learn, but if your students are like mine many of them "hate" poetry. From experience I can tell you most of the groans come from students who don't really know what poetry is. In addition, a lot of poetry is taught in isolation - a once a year poetry unit, and then kids never see it again. Instead of the once a year unit, try integrating poetry into your American history units!
Throughout history, people have used poems for a variety of reasons. Some poems have been written to commemorate an important event (such as a war), as protests, to honor religious beliefs, and to reflect people's thoughts. All of these could be used to better understand historical time periods.
To help you integrate poetry into your units, here is a collection of poems and poets by American History time period. As always, please read the poems and make sure they are appropriate for your students.
Colonial Times
Anne Bradstreet - "Prologue" and "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
Revolutionary War
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Concord Hymn"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - "Paul Revere's Ride"
Phillis Wheatley - "His Excellency General Washington"
War of 1812
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - "Old Ironsides"
Mid-Nineteenth Century
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "The Sphinx"
Emily Dickinson - "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"
Civil War
Walt Whitman - "O Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
Herman Melville - "Misgivings" and "Ball's Bluff: A Reverie"
Hanford L. Gordon - "Only a Private Killed"
Camp Meeting Poetry - veterans would gather and share their poems. A good example of this is by Adjutant Byers 5th Iowa Cavalry - "Sherman's March to the Sea"
A book of these poems is From Odes, Hymns, and Songs of the GAR collected by James Henry Kyner.
For a Confederate viewpoint, try Henry Timrod, who is often called the poet laureate of the Confederacy. "
Ethnogenesis," "A Cry to Arms," "The Two Armies," and "Carolina"
Late Nineteenth Century
Walt Whitman - "I Hear America Singing"
Emma Lazarus - "The New Colossus"
Cowboy Poetry - Cowboy Poetry is still written today, so there are historical poems as well as contemporary ones. Here are two poems from the early 20th century:
Arthur Chapman - "Out Where West Begins"
Bruce Kiskaddon - "When They've Finished Shipping Cattle in the Fall"
This website has a collection of classic cowboy poems: Cowboy Poetry
World War I
Wilfred Owen - "Arms and the Boy" and "
Dulce et Decorum Est"Irving Berlin - (lyrical songs) - "Reveille: Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning
"TS Eliot - "The Waste Land"
Alan Seeger - "I Have a Rendezvous with Death"
WarPoets.org.uk is an excellent resource for poetry from WWI.
Early 20th Century
Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken"
Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poet) - "Fog"
Woody Guthrie (Great Depression) - "All You Fascists"
Edna St. Vincent Millay - "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and "Recuerdo"
Harlem Renaissance
James Weldone Johnson - "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"
Langston Hughes - "Dreams," "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I,Too" "I, Too" is often paired with Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" for analysis.
Claude McKay - "If We Must Die
"W.E.B. Du Bois - "My Country 'Tis of Thee"
World War II
Richard Wilbur - "First Snow in Alsace"
Randall Jarrell - "The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner"
Gwendolyn Brooks - "Negro Hero"
WarPoets.org.uk is an excellent resource for poetry about WWII.
Holocaust Poetry
Sudeep Padegar - "Tale of a Sprinter, in the Winter of 1938"
Barbara Sonek - "Holocaust"
Cold War/1950s & 1960s
This was the time of the Beat Poets and Protest Singers.
Jack Keroauc - "Mexico City Blues (113th Chorus)"
Allen Ginsberg - "A Supermarket in California"
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) - "Legacy" and "Valery as Dictator"
Mary Oliver - "Hummingbird" and "This Morning Again It Was in the Dusty Pines"
Civil Rights
Dudley Randall - "Ballad of Birmingham"
Sam Bradley - "African in this Different Land"
Etheridge Knight - "For Malcolm, A Year After"
Nikky Finney - "Dancing with Strom"
Natasha Trethewey - "History Lesson"
Angela Jackson - "Miz Rosa Rides the Bus"
Nikki Giovanni - "Rosa Parks"
Jacqueline Woodson - "February 12, 1963"
Vietnam
WarPoets.org.uk is an excellent resource for poetry about the Vietnam War.
9/11/Terrorism
Wislawa Szymborska - "Photograph from September 11"
Rachel Zucker - "Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday"
Stephen Dunn - "Grudges"
Deborah Garrison - "I Saw You Walking"
David Lehman - "World Trade Center"
Iraq/Afghanistan
Brian Turner - "2000 lbs" and "What Every Soldier Should Know" Do you use any poets in your history lessons? If so, leave a comment and let me know what your favorite poems are! Thanks!