“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”– Homer, The Odyssey
In Pioneer’s ongoing series of blogs here, here, here, and here on curricular resources for parents, families, and teachers during COVID-19, this one focuses on:
Celebrating National Poetry Month.
“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations,” President John F. Kennedy said in the fall of 1963, memorializing poet Robert Frost at Amherst College. “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” It is important for our children and us to appreciate, recite, and share poetry, not only because it’s perhaps the most enduring mode for transmitting human language and stories, but because across the ages poetry is also the most permanently beautiful expression of the human mind and soul. As April marks the 25th annual celebration of National Poetry Month, there needs to be a far, far greater commitment to teaching poetry across all of American education, from K-12 schooling to higher ed. To do our part in ensuring that learning process begins as early as possible, we’re offering a variety of resources to help parents, teachers, and schoolchildren, including:

Mother Goose Treasury: A Beautiful Collection of Favorite Nursery Rhymes, by Parragon Books and Priscilla Lamont (Illustrator)

Paul Revere’s Ride, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Author), Ted Rand (Illustrator)

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings, by Shel Silverstein (Author, Illustrator)

Gilgamesh the Hero, by Geraldine McCaughrean (Author/Adaptor)

Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes, by David Roessel (Editor) and Arnold Rampersad (Editor)

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?, by Jim Gigliotti

Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson, by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin (Editor)

Who Was Walt Whitman?, by Kirsten Anderson

Beowulf, by Michael Morpurgo (Author/Adaptor)

Who Was William Shakespeare?, by Celeste Mannis

Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, by Michael Morpurgo (Author/Adaptor)

Dante’s Divine Comedy: As Told for Young People, by Dante Alighieri and Joseph Tusiani (Author/Adoptor)

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (Author) and Geraldine McCaughrean (Author/Adapter)

Stories From the Faerie Queen: Eight Fairy Tales for Children, by Edmund Spenser (Author) and Jeanie Lang (Author/Adaptor)

Ruslan and Lyudmila, by Alexander Pushkin (Author) and Roger Clarke (Translator)

Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, by Robert Pinsky

Gilgamesh: A New English Version, by Stephen Mitchell (Translator)

The Iliad, by Homer (Author), Robert Fitzgerald (Translator)

The Odyssey, by Homer (Author) and Robert Fitzgerald (Translator)

Complete Poetry and Writings, by Phillis Wheatley

The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe (Author), Jay Parini (Introduction)

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson (Author) and Thomas H. Johnson (Editor)

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, by Langston Hughes (Author), and Arnold Rampersad (Editor)

The Poems of Sappho, by Sappho (Author) and Mary Barnard (Translator)

The Aeneid by Virgil (Author), Robert Fagles (Translator)

The Song of Roland, by Dorothy L. Sayers (Translator)

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (Author), Antony Esolen (Translator), Gustave Dore (Illustrator)

Complete Sonnets and Poems: The Oxford Shakespeare, by William Shakespeare (Author) and Colin Burrow (editor)

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, by Seamus Heaney (Translator)

Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Author) and John Leonard (Editor, Introduction)

The Complete Poems of John Keats, by John Keats (Author)

The Annotated Ancient Mariner: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Author) and by Gustave Dore (Illustrator)

Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Author) and Walter Kaufmann (Translator, Introduction)

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran (Author)

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova (Author) and Roberta Reeder (Editor)

Collected Poems in English, by Joseph Brodsky (Author)

Richard Wilbur: Collected Poems 1943-2004

Omeros, by Derek Walcott

New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, by Czeslaw Milosz (Author)

The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country, by Amanda Gorman (Author), Oprah Winfrey (Foreword)
