{"id":12570,"date":"2025-09-25T13:21:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T17:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teachersfirst.com\/blog\/?p=12570"},"modified":"2025-09-25T13:11:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T17:11:41","slug":"bringing-poetry-to-your-classroom-with-t-s-eliot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachersfirst.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/bringing-poetry-to-your-classroom-with-t-s-eliot\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Poetry to Your Classroom with T.S. Eliot"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Do you like Cats<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not the cute little fuzzballs that curl in your lap and purr as you read your favorite book, but the 1981, Andrew Lloyd Webber, fourth-longest-running-musical-masterpiece-performed-entirely-in-song Cats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If your answer is no<\/em>, bear with me and don’t go anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if your answer is yes, then I\u2019m sure you know that Cats<\/em> is based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats<\/em>. It\u2019s true: the American turned expatriate, 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature-winning poet who gave us “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock<\/a>” and The Waste Land <\/em>also gave us these wonderful lines in \u201cThe Naming of Cats\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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My point is that T.S. Eliot, one of the great voices of the modernist literary movement, had magnificent range in his writing, and there is an Eliot poem for every age and ability.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Poetry is essential and should be taught regularly in schools. Too often, poetry is severed from our regular lesson plans and relegated to the “poetry unit,\u201d or we read a poem that supports a mentor text and never truly investigate it. Elena Aguilar, in her Edutopia <\/em>article “Five Reasons Why We Need Poetry in Schools<\/a>,\u201d argues that poetry is essential for our youngest learners because it introduces them to the rhythm and rhyme of language, and for English Language Learners because it allows for free expression\u2014the exact reason why music is so important when learning a language. Furthermore, Matthew James Friday elaborates on another of Aguilar’s points in his Edutopia <\/em>article “How Poetry Supports Emotional Intelligence<\/a>” by emphasizing that poetry helps create community, shared experiences, and connects to the core of humanity. These benefits mainly target reading poetry\u2014so imagine the benefits when we analyze, question, recite, and even write poetry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, in honor of T.S. Eliot’s birthday (September 26, 1888), here are some Eliot-focused poetry suggestions for each school level:<\/p>\n\n\n\n