Close Reading: Poetry, Teaching Copy

This stand-alone resource is taken from the opening section of the highly regarded 215-page ‘Writing Unseen Commentaries: A Student Help Book’, a two-year course in the close textual analysis of short prose extracts and poems, designed to help students, within a clear framework, develop the skills of focused reading and critical commentary – skills they will be called upon to demonstrate within most national and international pre-university literature examinations.

This is the introductory poetry unit from that course. The prose (fiction) equivalent is also published in the WordSmith Guides series. Both make full use of the innovative SCASI structure (Setting, Character, Action, Style and Ideas), an invaluable tool for the analysis of not only short pieces of literature but also whole works.

This is also the Teaching Copy of the resource: the suggested responses to the study tasks are included in the body of the unit, whereas in the Student Edition they are located in a separate section at the end, so that teachers can dispense them to students as they see fit, for the purposes of self-assessment.