Why Teach Poetry? Part 2: Explications of Poems by Contemporary Poets: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” and Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”

This is Part 2 of a paper that gives support to the question of whether or not poetry should be taught.Part 1 explores the question in depth of why poetry should be taught and includes an explication of Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses."Here, in Part 2, two additional explications by contemporary poets are presented: Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Lovers of the Poor," and Seamus Heaney's "Digging."Each explication is followed by activities for teaching poetry to Japanese university EFL students along with assessment tasks.The goal of the study is to encourage Japanese university EFL students to learn how to explicate poems and to provide an approach for EFL teachers to teach poetry in their second language classrooms. A Punch in the Face: Teaching Brooks's "The Lovers of the Poor"Whoever said 'the pen is mightier than the sword' must have been thinking of Gwendolyn Brooks.In "The Lovers of the Poor," Brooks delivers a scathing attack on a group of perhaps 10 charity women who visit the poor, specifically what appears to be the abode of the persona of the poem.Here, I give my intro-