Understanding Poetry Online: an Internet Application for Teaching

This poster session offers participants a thorough overview
of the genesis, process, development, and utilization of
Understanding Poetry Online, an application for teaching
formal and analytical approaches to verse. Developed at
Vanderbilt University, this application offers instructors and
students new and different ways of approaching fundamental
issues in college-level instruction in poetry including the ability
to create, share, and deliver, and take lessons online.
Participants will learn how this application originated, how it
has been supported and developed, and how it continues to be
used, assessed, and refined. In this way, the session will offer
both an introduction to a useful new technology, and a
discussion of how such technologies can be developed.
The teaching of poetry to undergraduates has two components:
training students to recognize basic poetic forms, techniques,
meters, and rhymes, and helping students to develop and defend
thematic observations about the poetry. The challenge to
teachers at all levels is to integrate these two aspects of teaching,
so that students can use their acquired knowledge of scansion,
rhyme, imagery, and so forth to deepen and enrich their
understanding of the themes and contexts of the poetry. We
have designed the Understanding Poetry Online application to
help train students in both aspects of poetic analysis and
especially to integrate those aspects.
The Understanding Poetry Online project has elucidated
students' learning processes and progress by providing a rich,
interactive multimedia platform for the acquisition and
application of both the technical and analytical reading of poetry
at the university level. Our Sonnet Scansion and Analysis
program is a web-based interface for designing and
implementing curricula that facilitate assessment of students'
learning of critical poetry reading skills in the following ways:
• providing an online, on-demand environment for reviewing
and acquiring the skills of metrical scansion, rhyme scheme
analysis, and analytical reasoning;
• making the processes of reading and analysis visible with
on-screen, color-coded, computer-assisted poetic scansion
tools; • providing a facility for user-stored and
instructor/user-retrievable in-depth analyses of poetic forms
and content;
• creating links from the online environment to the classroom
and student study groups with printable versions of all
online activities and work;
• encouraging students to integrate their online work with
essays they are writing for classes.
The application continues to evolve, and has grown from a
basic web-page into a fully-automated instructional technology