Poetry+of+the+Fantastic+-+Rationale

__//**Rationale **//__

For this Anthology, I have decided to focus on the concept of ‘Fantasy,’ as I believe that mythical and miraculous poems are effective stimuli for adolescent readers, particularly those who aren’t familiar with the poetry genre, or who actively resist reading it altogether. The class I have in mind for this Anthology are a Year 11 Advanced class, as I feel the poems I have selected will familiarise them with the context of certain prescribed HSC texts and their composers. I chose Ben Jonson’s ‘Hymn to Diana’ as he was a Renaissance poet, and I felt that students would be more comfortable with studying Shakespeare and Donne for the HSC if they were familiar with other texts and authors from the same time period. Shakespeare and Donne were largely influenced by the works of classical scholars such as Ovid, as well as Greco-Roman mythology, so I also included poetry that personified deities and heroes, most of which were pre-twentieth century poems.

I also attempted to make the poems less ‘gendered’ than I had originally intended. I may be mistaken, but I assume that teenage boys will only read about fairies and drops of dew for so long, before they become bored and/or disgusted by poetry altogether. So I selected two works from Poe, and some medieval poetry, such as ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ and ‘A Song of Sherwood,’ in the hope of engaging male readers, or indeed, any student who might be interested in the more macabre offerings in the canon. A very useful resource I found online is a poetry repository called ‘Poems of the Fantastic and the Macabre’, which categorises fantastical poems by their time period (‘Renaissance’, Victorian Era’ etc).

I feel that fantasy poems would assist students in learning to identify relevant literary techniques and conventions, as the content of the poems will engage readers, while also illustrating rich examples of imagery and descriptive language. An outcome from the NSW Preliminary English Syllabus states: “4. A student describes and explains the ways in which language forms and features, and structures of particular texts shape meaning and influence responses.” Hopefully, with adequate study of the poems with my students, I would help students achieve a deep understanding of poetry as a genre, as well as enriching them with an appreciation of the form.

I have also developed a PowerPoint Presentation for two poems in order to help students revise language techniques and conventions, then apply their knowledge to the context of each work. I hope to illustrate important links between visual and written imagery by isolating specific language devices and showing students how they function in poetry.