In This Series Music of the Hemispheres Music Of the Hemispheres, Teacher Manual Building Poems Building Poems: Teacher Manual World Of Poetry World Of Poetry, Teacher Manual Poetry and Humanity Poetry and Humanity, Teacher Manual Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Beauty Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Beauty. Teacher Manual Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Truth Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Truth. Teacher Manual

Poetics Program by Michael Clay Thompson

This wonderful program is designed to enable students to understand poetry on a far higher plane than has been previously possible. These books can be used as stand-alone introductions to poetry for young students, or they can set the stage for a more advanced program that should come in middle school or high school.

Students are taught in increasing detail about the elements of poems, including patterns of sound, meter, stanza, figures of speech, poetic techniques, and meaning.

Michael Clay Thompson shows how meticulously a poet plans and crafts poems. Students gain an appreciation of both the rigorous intellectual discipline and the complex creativity that a poet must bring together to make a poem.

With books that are beautiful, creative, engaging and unusual, the series positively soars.

A key method of Michael Clay Thompson in teaching poetics is to get students to vocalize the sounds of letters and words. Watch a video clip of him showing teachers how to do this.

For a complete overview, go to the Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Curriculum page.

Support Groups for users of Michael Clay Thompson's Language Arts series: Homeschoolers and parents are invited to join the Yahoo! Group: MCTLA
Teachers and educators in schools are invited to join the Yahoo! Group: MCTteachers

Michael Clay Thompson Course Packages
We have made available special packages of the curriculum to help make your ordering easier and to help you save money. Includes student book and teacher's manual for each stage of the curriculum: Homeschool Packages | School Examination Packages

Recommend this series to a friend or colleague

Music of the Hemispheres

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 6562S) Add to Cart

This introduction to poetry emphasizes that poetry demands a whole-brain appreciation.

Among featured topics in this volume are:

Sound in language

Rhyme, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye rhyme.

Alliteration

Meter: the foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl.

Stanza: sonnet, quatrain, couplet, ballad.

Poetic techniques: simile and metaphor.

Poets quoted include: Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns; William Shakespeare; Thomas Hardy, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Samples (pdf files) page 4  | page 44 | page 139

Music Of the Hemispheres, Teacher Manual

Building Poems

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 6589S) Add to Cart

The second book of Michael Clay Thompson's stunning new Poetry series uses architecture as an extended metaphor, showing that poems are constructed like buildings and with careful attention to every detail.

Topics: alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, sonnet, ballad, rime royal, limerick, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, endstopped/enjambed. Can be used as a stand-alone introduction to poetry for young students, or to set the stage for a more advanced program in middle or high school.

Enables students to understand and appreciate poetry on a far higher level than usual. Stunningly presented.

Poets quoted in this volume include: Lewis Carroll, TS Eliot, Gelett Burgess, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robet Louis Stevenson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Henry Longfellow, Percy Shelley,William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Samples: (pdf files) Page 5 | Page 29 | Page 39 | Page 51

Building Poems: Teacher Manual

Teacher manuals for the curriculum always contain the student book, plus extra pages for instruction, answers to questions where applicable and suggestions throughout the text for teachers to implement.

 Sample page (pdf file) page 28  | page 129 | page 141   

World Of Poetry

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 6600S) Add to Cart

This volume is built on comparisons of poetic and scientific observations of nature and the world around us.

Among featured topics are:

Sound: alliteration, assonance, consonance, end-stopped enjambed.

Rhyme: end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, near rhyme.

Meter: the foot, iamb, trochee, dactyl, spondee, amphibrach, amphimacer, pyrrhic.

Stanza: Shakespearan sonnet, Petrarchan sonnet, ballad, rime royal, limerick, haiku.

Figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe.

The grammar of poetry

Poetic genius, originality

Poets quoted include: T S Eliot, Walt Whitman, Christina Rosetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A E Houseman, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allen Poe, W B Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Emma Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Basho Matsuo.

Sample pages (pdf files): page 6 | page 56| page 137

World Of Poetry, Teacher Manual

Poetry and Humanity

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 6627S) Add to Cart

This volume develops and expands the program even further and is built on a theme of understanding humanity and our existence. It shows how poets push language to its maximum in order to express those things about humanity that are most true, or difficult or subtle. Longer and more challenging poems are used as examples.

Topics included in the previous volumes are also here, but in more detail, also in addition:

Advanced Rhymes: half-double rhyme, elided rhyme, amphisbaenic rhyme, reverse rhyme, half-rhyme.

Advanced meter from monometer to octameter.

Stanza: heroic couplet, terza rima, villanelle, quintet, sestet, octet, submerged sonnet.

Figures of speech: metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron.

Poets quoted include:Thomas Hardy, William Blake, William Shakespeare, Henry Longfellow, Algernon Swinburne, W B Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, William Cowper, WS Gilbert, Thomas Wyatt, William Wordsworth, G J Chesterton.

Sample pages (pdf files): Table of Contents | page 5 |  page 47

Poetry and Humanity, Teacher Manual

Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Beauty

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 6643S) Add to Cart

Using Plato's Dialogues and Socratic questioning as a source of ideas and a way of thinking about the complex problem of beauty, this, the fifth volume in the acclaimed new Poetics Program by Michael Clay Thompson, continues the study of poetry techniques and poems. It is a wonderfully illustrated, thought-provoking and challenging addition to the series and, like the other volumes, can also stand alone.

Is beauty relative? Is beauty a mystery? Poetry helps us look at these questions.

The table of contents includes: The Beauty of the Voice; Beautiful Patterns of Sound; Meter and Beauty; The Beauty of Stanza.

The student is asked to explore further such concepts as The Complex World of Technique and the Socratic paradox: "I only know that I know nothing".

There are numerous quotations from Plato and Aristotle.

Poets quoted include: Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; William Blake; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Geoffrey Chaucer; Edmund Spenser; Alexander Pope; John Milton; ee cummings; Sylvia Plath; Ralph Hodgson; Herman Melville; John Keats; WB Yeats; Ben Jonson; Robinson Jeffers; Christina Rosetti; William Wordsworth.

Sample pages (pdf files): page 5 | page 35 | page 111

Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Beauty. Teacher Manual

Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Truth

Class sets of 25 or more: $18.00 each; includes free teacher manual. (Order Code: 666XS) Add to Cart

This, the sixth and latest volume in the Poetics Program by Michael Clay Thompson, continues the study of poetry techniques and poems and takes it to a higher level. It can be used as a stand-alone or as a continuation of the series.

Using Plato's Dialogues and Socratic questioning as a source of ideas and a way of thinking about the concept of truth, we are led to consider the difficult question that has absorbed philosophers, scientists, artists and poets: what is the nature of truth?

Many poems deal with the concept of truth. Great poems that stand the test of time express, at their core, something that is true.

We look at the truth of Sound, Meter and Stanza and at Figures of Speech that explore Truth through Comparison.

Poets quoted include: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, Edmund Spenser, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Sample pages (pdf files):page 5 | page 114

Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Truth. Teacher Manual