--- title: Poetry Analysis description: Poetry analysis involves dissecting poems to understand their deeper meanings, structures, and emotional impacts. Learners will master tools for evaluating meter, rhyme, imagery, and tone, enabling them to write critical essays and appreciate the nuances of poetic works. category: literature-writing subcategory: poetry difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/poetry-analysis --- # Poetry Analysis Poetry analysis involves dissecting poems to understand their deeper meanings, structures, and emotional impacts. Learners will master tools for evaluating meter, rhyme, imagery, and tone, enabling them to write critical essays and appreciate the nuances of poetic works. ## Available Resources 3 Books • 2 Courses • 4 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Poem Analysis A free library of line-by-line poem analyses written by a team of contributors, covering thousands of poems with notes on themes, structure, meter, and literary devices. Useful for checking your own close reading of a poem against a worked interpretation. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://poemanalysis.com/ **Tags:** poetry-analysis, close-reading, literary-devices, poetic-form, study-guides ### 2. Poetry Foundation Glossary Roughly 250 entries covering literary devices, poetic forms and movements, each defined concisely and many linking to fuller pages with example poems and essays. Lets a reader check unfamiliar critical vocabulary against actual poems rather than abstract definitions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary **Tags:** poetry, literary-terms, poetic-forms, literary-devices, glossary ### 3. poets.org Poets.org is the official site of the Academy of American Poets. It features a large collection of poems and poet bios, plus audio readings, essays, and classroom resources for readers and educators. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://poets.org **Tags:** websites, arts-design, creative-arts ### 4. poetrysociety.org PoetrySociety.org is a hub for poets and readers, offering craft-focused articles, teaching resources, and information on events, competitions, and publications. It covers a range of poetry forms and techniques, including guidance on free verse. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://poetrysociety.org **Tags:** websites, humanities-social-sciences, poetry ## Courses ### 1. Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop Why just write poems when you can write better ones? This course is built on the notion that the most exciting writing begins after the first draft. It is specifically for folks who believe that writing poems just to express oneself is like using the Internet just for email. After all, poetry can change the way you and your readers think of the world and its inhabitants; it can break new ground for language; turn a blank sheet of paper into a teeming concert of voices and music. Though any of us may have the potential to make that happen, having an understanding of how several tools of poetic composition can be used (and audaciously “mis-used”) gives you more ways to try (and if we do this right, we might surprise ourselves most of all). We'll cover key poetic terms and devices by studying poems by a handful of modern and contemporary poets and then get a chance to try our own hand at writing new poem drafts from a select number of prompts. Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to workshop your poem drafts and get feedback on your work, working towards a more polished poem. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/poetry-workshop **Tags:** poetry, creative-writing, poetry-workshop, revision, poetic-devices ### 2. Modern & Contemporary American Poetry ModPo is a FREE (no fee, no charge) fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems! Join us and try it! ModPo is open all year, so you can enroll now, or any time, and join us. Each year we host a lively, interactive 10-week session, in which we move together through the ten-week syllabus. The next live 10-week session of ModPo will begin on August 31, 2025, and will conclude on November 10, 2025. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 1 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team any time at modpo@writing.upenn.edu. Much more information about ModPo can be found at modpo.org. During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups. If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end. If you use Facebook, join the always-thriving ModPo group: from inside Facebook, search for "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry" and then request to be added as a member. If you have any questions about ModPo, you can post a question to the FB group and you'll receive an almost instant reply. Much more information about ModPo can be found at modpo.org . ModPo is hosted by—and is housed at—the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia USA. All ModPo'ers are welcome to visit the Writers House when they are in our area. Our discussions are filmed there. Our live webcasts take place in the famed "Arts Cafe" of the House. To find out what's going on at the Writers House any time, just dial 215-746-POEM. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo **Tags:** courses, humanities-social-sciences, literrature-analysis ## Podcasts ### 1. Poetry Off the Shelf **Author:** Poetry Foundation Producer Helena de Groot talks to poets about language, dreams, love and loss, identity, connection, anger, discomfort, the creative process, the state of the world and the world of the soul. Hard conversations are welcomed—laughter is, too. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ **Tags:** poetry, poet-interviews, creative-process, contemporary-poetry ### 2. Poetry Unbound **Author:** Pádraig Ó Tuama Short podcast from On Being in which Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama reads one poem per episode and walks through it line by line, discussing imagery, form and meaning. Listeners build habits of close reading and meet a wide range of contemporary poets. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://onbeing.org/series/poetry-unbound/ **Tags:** close-reading, contemporary-poetry, poetry-appreciation, poetry ## Books ### 1. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor **Author:** Thomas C. Foster An accessible guide to reading poems with confidence, covering line breaks, rhythm, meter, rhyme, sonnets and other forms, imagery, and allusion. Afterward you can approach an unfamiliar poem methodically and explain how its sound and structure shape its meaning. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/006211378X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, poetry ### 2. Poetry: An Introduction **Author:** Ruth Miller, Robert A. Greenberg A university textbook that introduces the elements of poetry, sets out contexts for interpreting poems, and includes a substantial anthology for practice. It gives students the basic vocabulary needed to analyse poems and discuss their language, form, and meaning. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0333329856?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, poetry ### 3. The Art of Poetry **Author:** Shira Wolosky A Hebrew University literary scholar's guide to how poems work, moving from words and figures through verse forms such as the sonnet, stanza patterns, and rhythm and meter. Each concept is demonstrated through close readings of canonical English and American poems. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195371186?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, poetry --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/poetry-analysis