Wallace Stevens
Lesson plans for "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and other poems

Audio files and texts of three Wallace Stevens poems: "A Postcard from the Volcano," "The House was Quiet and the World was Calm," and "The Snow Man." A good site for LD students, ELL students, and for those who read well and might like to record and contribute. Files are in alphabetical order by poet; scroll down.

Text and analysis.

Link to the text of the poem, photographs, and information from Google maps.

Downloadable audio file of the poem (1:05).

In this NPR audio link, commentator Jay Keyser discusses the structure of the poem and its relationship to meaning.

Introduction/background and text of the poem. Available in PDF and Google Docs formats.

Text of the poem.

Scroll down to find the audio file of N. Scott Momaday reading the poem.

Analysis.

6 discussion questions.

Student writers will select four different stanzas from Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Choosing a different topic (other than a blackbird) to write about, they will borrow Stevens' sentence structures and write an impersonation of the four stanzas they have chosen. When all four stanzas are read together, the student will show that he/she has gained new knowledge about the topic being explored through this writing. This lesson focuses on idea development and sentence fluency.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. Students will compare and contrast the role of the speaker in Wordsworth's "The Daffodils," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43" (How do I Love Thee?), and Wallace Stevens' modernist "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Lesson includes graphic organizer, requires Adobe Reader for access.