War and Poetry

Students will analyze the points of view and opinions of war by examining poetry from the corresponding time period.

Students will read poems by the following authors:

Ernest Hemmingway was an American author and journalist who was involved in the Spanish Civil War and WWII.
Vera Brittain was a privileged English woman who spent most of her career as a writer. However, during her youth, she spent the beginning of WWI serving as a V.A.D. nurse and lost two close friends, her brother and fiancé in the First World War. After the war she was married and continued to write, while developing interests and involvement in pacifism.
Langston Hughes was born at the turn of the century and was an American writer. He wrote numerous works of poetry, play and prose, but is best known for his social activism and work, which contributed to the Harlem Renaissance.

(Reading)

Students will be able to understand and explain how an author uses word choice to create mood and convey his/her tone about a topic.
Students will compare and contrast the point of view of the authors on the wars about which they were respectively writing.

Students will have a background on poetry analysis and will know how to identify certain elements of poetry prior to this lesson (rhyme scheme, tone, mood, word choice, symbolism, & allusion).
Students will be placed in three groups. Each group will start with poetry from one of the following wars: Civil War, World War I, or World War II.
Students will analyze the poems in their station by answering the sourcing questions from the student worksheet and by making observations about the author’s word choice and tone. Some examples of historical thinking skills questions that may guide the discussion include: Sourcing: What is the date of this poem? Who is the author? What was the author’s relation to the war? Close Reading: What was the author of this poem feeling about the war? What specific words or phrases offer evidence for these feelings? Contextualization: What major historical events happened around the date that this was written?
Students will move through each of the three stations and continue to answer questions and record observations about the poems.
After all groups have analyzed all poems, they will be asked to reflect and compare/contrast the poetry from each war (This may or may not be completed as a whole class).

Students will be asked to write a poem of their own that reflects their opinions about a recent/ongoing war in the world.

Brittain, Vera. “Perhaps.” The First World War Poetry Digital Archive. www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/3084/2738 (accessed February 20, 2012).

The Dying Confederate’s Last Words. Broadside. United States: 1861-1865. Brown University Library, Harris Broadsides Collection. http://library.brown.edu/find/Record/dc1264175390562500 (accessed February 20, 2012).

Hemingway, Ernest. “Chapter Heading.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176683#poem (accessed February 20, 2012).

Hughes, Langston. “Green Memory.” From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, p. 401. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995. Available online http://books.google.com/books?id=J_nNM6TiNkgC&lpg=PA401&ots=w7GwzvqO8M&dq=green%20memory%20%2B%20langston%20hughes&pg=PA401#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed March 1, 2012).

Hughes, Langston. “WWII.” From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, p. 415. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995. Available online http://books.google.com/books?id=J_nNM6TiNkgC&lpg=PA401&ots=w7GwzvqO8M&dq=green%20memory%20%2B%20langston%20hughes&pg=PA401#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed March 1, 2012).