Building Poems, the second book of Michael Clay Thompson's poetics series, uses architecture as an extended metaphor, showing that poems are constructed like buildings, with careful attention to every detail. Like the metaphor itself, the book is constructed so that it beautifully illustrates the points made by reinforcing them visually.
This book takes the same basic topics that were introduced in The Music of the Hemispheres and expands upon them, adding new elements. It includes alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, poetic feet, iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls, spondees, sonnets, ballads, rime royal, limericks, similes, metaphors, personification, apostrophe, and endstopped versus enjambed lines.
These elements are exhibited in the poems of famous poets such as Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Henry Longfellow, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Shakespeare, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The book enables students to understand and appreciate poetry on a far higher level than usual. It 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.
Note: New to the second edition of this book are QR codes that link to audio of Michael Clay Thompson himself reading the poems in the book.
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