Course: A-level Study Boost: Unseen Poetry and the Creative Process

Want to study further? If you’ve enjoyed the course and hearing from our students and Rebecca, our BA English Literature with Creative Writing may be of interest. You’ll be introduced …

Want to study further? If you’ve enjoyed the course and hearing from our students and Rebecca, our BA English Literature with Creative Writing may be of interest. You’ll be introduced …

Reading and writing poetry can provide us with a new perspective, or a new understanding of our own perspectives; a lot can be gained through reading poetry. With practise, we …

Shape in poetry can be visual, as you saw in Step 1.9, but a poem’s appearance on the page also changes the way in which you hear and understand what’s …

Look over the notes that you wrote down in the previous Step. These words form the starting point for your poem, ‘The View from Here.’ Look How would you describe …

When writing poetry, it can be difficult to know where to begin. In this workshop, you meet the author of ‘Patagonia’, Kate Clanchy. Kate and Rebecca will introduce you to …

In Kate Clanchy’s poem, ‘Patagonia’, we look out over a wide, icy landscape. We listen to the waves and hear birds above us as they wheel through a cold, clear …

Did you know that the English word ‘poet’ comes from an Ancient Greek word that can mean a maker or an inventor as well as someone who writes verse? The …

Let’s play with the room metaphor a little bit more to consider the different roles between poets and readers. Builders Poets are like the skilled craftspeople who create rooms – …

Puzzles, as mentioned in the previous Step, are not always there to be ‘solved’. Sometimes, mystery and the feeling of not knowing something are essential to the experience of reading …

Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of Week 1! You’ve been exploring feelings, patterns and puzzles and reflecting on how using these techniques to analyse a poem helps you to better …

You may have come across the word ‘stanza’ if you’ve studied poetry before. A stanza is also sometimes called a verse: it’s a group of lines of poetry set off …

Sometimes you’ll encounter words in poems that you’ve never seen before. Sometimes poets will use familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Sometimes you might encounter references to people, places, or situations …

In the previous Step you considered what feelings you thought were expressed in ‘Patagonia’, and what your own feelings were in response to the poem. In the first of our …

When you read and listen to poetry, you may notice patterns in the shape and sound of the verse. Sometimes the patterns will come from repeated sounds. Rhyme and alliteration …