As some readers here will know already, I'm a poet and fiction writer, as well as a book reviewer and writer of literary criticism. Suffice it to say that I have thoughts about poetry. What they all boil down to is this:
Please don't be afraid of poetry.
It's interesting to me that although there are novels which are challenging to read (The Sound and the Fury, The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses . . . ), people typically don't say, "Oh, I can't read fiction." Usually, though they may be aware that difficult novels exist –maybe were assigned them in school or college and that was enough, thank you very much – they are also aware that more readable novels exist, and that they are perfectly capable of understanding and enjoying them.
Poetry, on the other hand, is universally scary. Of course people have valid reasons for thinking that they fear and dislike poetry. Everyone's experienced that high-school English teacher, that college professor, who liked to load up even what look like accessible, readable, enjoyable poems with such a freight of significance – hidden symbolic codes that you have to crack to get at the real meaning, which is probably all about death anyway, what fun – that any impulse of delight, on reading Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," for example, would inevitably implode under the weight of all that ponderous overthinking and never recover. In short, if you went to school, I can understand why you might believe that you don't like poetry and can't read it.
I'm here to help you re-wire those thoughts about poetry. You can read it. You can enjoy it. You must read and enjoy it with your children – and this is possible. It's possible even for you, who don't possess any special knowledge or remember the names of literary terms. Yes, there are difficult poems out there, even as there are difficult novels. But there are poems you can read, understand, and delight in, alongside your children. You don't need to teach them. You simply need to read.
How? Well, this is something I've talked about a good bit in podcast interviews:
and maybe a little more generally, with more focus on my own development as a writer,
More about the "why" of reading poetry with children, from the Ambleside Online Advisory (you'll want to scroll down to the bottom).
In my family, when my children were young, we enjoyed comic poems quite a bit, in addition to Mother Goose and other traditional children's poetry. Part of the joy of poetry is its play with the possibilities of language – if you just want great thoughts, read philosophy. Excellent comic poems are both successfully funny and formally successful: in other words, part of why they're funny is that they get the rhyme and meter right. Their technical perfection is part of their comic timing. If you want children to develop an ear for the way poetry in English traditionally works, read comic poems. Our favorite books were:
Opposites and More Opposites, Richard Wilbur (available in used editions)
Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet, Wallace Tripp (also available used)
We also adored Charles Causley, whose poems for children are sometimes funny and sometimes poignant. His Early in the Morning was a book we checked out of the Cambridge Public Library over and over, probably more than anything else we read. It's also available in used editions and worth tracking down.
Every family should have at least one edition of Mother Goose rhymes. This is one that we had. We also had this one. You memorize Mother Goose rhymes without even knowing what you're doing, which is the best way to memorize poems. Say them and say them until you can't un-say them. This is the beginning of memorization as a habit, something you organically do without having to make that much effort.
For the preschool and kindergarten set, in addition to Charles Causley, A Child's Garden of Verses is a must-have, as are A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.
Note that you won't stop reading these poems just because your children age out of kindergarten and early childhood, but this is the time to make their acquaintance.
For the primary and into the lower-secondary/middle-school years, Mater Amabilis uses Laura Berquist's anthology The Harp and the Laurel Wreath for poetry. This isn't the most visually inspiring book in the world, but I have liked it, not least because it introduces relatively young children to poems outside the bounds of what we usually think of as "children's poetry" – Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," for example – and then keeps reintroducing them at later and later stages, to allow the student to bring added maturity to his renewed reading of the poem. It's an excellent selection of poems that can last a student through high school.
Other anthologies I've liked and used at all levels include
Talking to the Sun, Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell (available in used editions)
The Rattle Bag, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney (available in used editions)
How to Eat a Poem, Ted Kooser
I haven't used this one, because it's brand-new, but I own and would recommend it: Poems to See By, a graphic artist's interpretation of a diversity of famous poems.
In high school I assign poetry to align with historical periods: English poetry from the Anglo-Saxon era to the 20th century in Grades 9 and 10, American and world poetry in Grades 11 and 12, with an emphasis on the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Grade 12.
In late high school, we also work through Laurence Perrine's classic Sound and Sense (available in multiple used editions) as a way of developing our understanding of the ways that poetic conventions like rhyme and meter, metaphor and image, create resonant meanings in a poem. Perrine is a bit of a curmudgeon, but he's fun, and says some illuminating things. I might suggest working through Sound and Sense yourself at some point, as part of your own Mother Culture/self-education process, and if you need a little extra support, my Introduction to Poetry course, using Perrine as a text, is available in the recorded-courses archive at Homeschool Connections. BUT be aware that you don't have to put yourself through any kind of course in order to read a poem. What's there on the page is there on the page, just as it is in a novel . . . so don't be afraid to dive right in.
Meanwhile, for a high-school student, and also for your own education, I would also recommend the Circe Institute's 30 Poems to Memorize Before It's Too Late, to which I, in company with a number of really illustrious people, contributed some introductory essays. The poem selections are diverse and excellent; overall, this is a book that should be a part of any Charlotte-Mason-homeschool family culture.
Finally, for your own education, I would commend to you the work of the Catholic poet Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, current Poet Laureate of California, tireless champion for the restoration of poetry to a central place in American culture. His essay "Poetry as Enchantment" is long but accessible, and gets at the heart of what makes poetry compelling as an experience (hint: it's not that it's some intellectual riddle that you need the Key to All Mythologies to solve). I have given his "Thirteen Ways of Thinking About the Poetic Line" to college students, but again, it's readable, and it may help you become a more confident reader of poetry, which will in turn benefit your children as they grow in, as Charlotte Mason puts it, "The Knowledge of Man.
Here is Laurence Perrine, in the first chapter of Sound and Sense, expanding on that knowledge with which poetry concerns itself, and which it holds out as a gift to those who read it:
***Poetry takes all life as its province. Its primary concern is not with beauty, not with philosophical truth, not with persuasion, but with experience. Beauty and philosophical truth are aspects of experience, and the poet is often engaged with them. But poetry as a whole is concerned with all kinds of experience –– beautiful or ugly, strange or common, noble or ignoble, actual or imaginary. One of the paradoxes of human existence is that all experience –– even painful experience –– when transmitted through the medium of art is, for the good reader, enjoyable . . . We find some value in all intense living. To be intensely alive is the opposite of being dead. To be dull, to be bored, to be imperceptive is in one sense to be dead. Poetry comes to us bringing life and therefore pleasure. Moreover, art focuses and so organizes experience as to give us a better understanding of it. And to understand life is partly to be master of it.****