How to Teach Walt Whitman Poems

Walt Whitman is considered the first poet of America. He answered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for new poets to express the New World of the United States. Whitman not only answered the call, he created a new style of writing that was uniquely American. Here you will learn how to teach Walt Whitman to a class of middle/high school students.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Background information on the poet
• The first stanzas of “Song of Myself”
• Pen and paper
• Overhead projector

1. Get to know the poet. Before you start to teach read several biographies of Walt Whitman. Knowing whom Whitman was and where he came from is essential to understanding his poems.
2. Introduce students to Whitman by giving them a brief background of the poet. Highlight that Whitman was a journalist and that he published and sold his own books of poems.
3. Read “Song of Myself” to the students. Most won’t understand it at first but that is okay. Just let them get used to the cadence of the poem, the rise and fall of your voice reading the poem.
4. Tell the students that Whitman wrote in free verse. Point out that he abandoned traditional verse that used formal meters and rhymes and instead wrote in list form, using natural voice and diction in order to imitate the natural flow of thought and feeling.
5. Take the students on a field trip outside of the classroom. This can be as simple as taking them out to the school courtyard or even to the cafeteria during lunchtime. Tell them that they are going to observe their surroundings and make a list of everything that they see and hear.
6. Write a poem. Once back in the classroom, have students use the list they created on their field trip to create a poem. Tell them to imagine that they are the cameraman and director of a film and they are going to write full sentences of the images they wrote down on their list, using adjectives to describe in careful detail each item on their list.

Tips & Warnings

• Help the students write their poem by modeling. Take your list and write sentences on the overhead projector that will culminate into a Whitman type poem.