Teaching and revising the poetry of Wilfred Owen

New launch

This week sees the arrival of a wealth of teaching resources to help teachers deliver well thought through lessons on the poetry of Wilfred Owen. One of the most well regarded poets of the twentieth century, Owen vividly recreated what it was like to serve on a combat frontline, through a variety of distinctive poetic techniques.

To help time-poor teachers, worksheets cover areas such as:

• How Owen employs the sonnet form
• His re-creation of specific voices
• Owen’s use of religious imagery
• The aural qualities of selected poems
• Guided explorations of Disabled and The Letter.

In addition, there are helpful revision and/or homework tasks for every poem covered in the Crossref-it.info text guide to Selected poems of Wilfred Owen. Each worksheet on a specific poem helps students investigate:

• Context
• Language and tone
• Structure and versification
• Imagery and symbolism
• Themes.

Written by highly qualified UK teachers and educationalists, you can find these and other resources at: http://www.crossref-it.info/textguide/Poetry-of-Wilfred-Owen/36/2706

Helping students understand the ramifications and impact of Owen’s verse has never been so pertinent in this year commemorating the onset of the First World War one hundred years ago.

The impact of location in literature

New launch: Impact of location in literature

This week sees the next theme covered by Crossref-it.info’s Only Connect tool, where they trace a theme across various works of literature, including its classical and/or biblical origins. ‘The impact of location’ makes for a fruitful personal exploration (required for a number of A Level English syllabuses) of how place is perceived in literature.

The associations of place

Gloomy caves;
                    open greens;
                                        darkened woodlands;
                                                            arid fields;
                                                                                gleaming urban sprawl;
                                                                                                    humble cottages...

When we encounter any one of these locations, we have an expectation of what might be likely to happen there. But why?

For centuries associations have grown up around locations and the atmosphere associated with them. These allusions have been created by fairy-tales, ancient myths and biblical narratives, then sustained by centuries of literature:

• Shakespeare deliberately places his characters in woodland or castle, wild coast or tavern knowing that we will expect certain sorts of behavior because of those locations
• Blake sometimes subverts our expectations, turning a place of pleasure into a place of threat, just as Graham Greene was to do 150 years later in Brighton Rock.

It’s fascinating to see how location has an impact on events and characters, sometimes seeming to determine the plot itself:

• In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy draws on the ancient classical anxiety of dense woodland and biblical suspicion of sophisticated urban environments, yet by no means upholds the simplistic pastoral ideal that associates the countryside with happy innocence
• Jean Rhys uses location in Wide Sargasso Sea to disorientate characters, destabilising their sense of identity and thus effecting their subsequent actions.

The impact of location in literature is huge. Why not explore it for yourself.