A World of Poetry – Student Book (Second Edition)

A World of Poetry builds on the first two books in the MCT poetics program but goes even further into the details of good poetry. This volume is built on comparisons of poetic and scientific observations of nature and the world around us. As with the other poetics books, the design of this book has been meticulously attended to so that it highlights the points in the text with beautiful and interesting visuals.

Among the featured topics are alliteration, assonance, consonance, end stopped versus enjambed lines, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye rhyme, near rhyme, poetic feet, iambs, trochees, dactyls, spondees, amphibrachs, amphimacers, pyrrhics, Shakespearean sonnets, Petrarchan sonnets, ballads, rime royals, limericks, haiku, similes, metaphors, personification, apostrophes, and the grammar of poetry.

There are many poems in the book that illustrate the poetic elements discussed, including ones by T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Houseman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allen Poe, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Emma Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, and Basho Matsuo, as well as original works by Michael himself.

The book allows students to see that the common stereotypes about poetry—that it is comprised only of pretty poems for girls—are unfounded. Poems can be powerful and tragic and exalting and painful and everything in between, often in ways that prose cannot.

As a special feature, this book contains QR codes that link to audio of Michael reading the poems.