Poetry is everywhere, across language and culture. Poems are timeless. They can tell stories of events or describe beautiful vistas. Poems connect us with the past and the world around us through universal emotions like love, hate, grief and wonder.

There is no denying that poetry can be very powerful, so why is it absent from the English classrooms? Students often balk at the idea of studying poetry in class. They believe that their language skills are an insurmountable impediment to understanding poetry in English.  However, it can be done, and there are lots of resources online to help and encourage. For example, through video-poems students analyze a poem and relate it to different pictures to create a video-poem. Here you have an example: