See, Sing, And Speak through Poetry: Odes and Anti-Odes

Michael Prior

Lesson Introduction

In this lesson, students will explore one of the oldest poetic modes, the ode, whose roots extend from Ancient Greece, where poetry’s social function was often connected to ideas of praise (and blame). Students will consider how, through sonorous celebration and precise attention, odes exemplify many fundamental concepts and techniques of lyric poetry. This lesson will also consider how odes have been used by BIPOC poets and LGBTQ2S+ poets to celebrate their identities and their communities in the face of systemic oppression.

Students will begin by reading and comparing a contemporary ode and a historical ode in order to try and define what an ode is and what some of its features might be. Next, they will learn a little about the history of odes before reading and discussing more contemporary odes and their antitheses, anti-odes. Students will engage in an ode title-generating and sharing activity and then will have in-class time to write their own odes or anti-odes.

Learning Objectives

In this lesson, students will have opportunities to:

Close read poems of praise with a focus on how the act of celebrating a person, place, thing, or experience asks the poet to attend more closely to not only language, but also their own positionality in the world.
Make connections between different odes, in order to better understand their craft, structure, context, and the ways in which poets converse with their predecessors through their work.
Consider how odes (and anti-odes) can be a way for poets to resist, call out, and connect with the people, places, things, and experiences that have been meaningful to them.
Write their own odes, and, in doing so, practice the poetic devices that they’ve identified and discussed in the poems they’ve read. This is also an opportunity for students to use writing as a means of discovery and self-reflection.