Five-Week Plan
A five-week sequence for Romantic Poetry: context, close reading, form, comparison, writing, creative response and seminar discussion.
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Year 11 ATAR Literature • Romantic Poetry Unit
Romantic Poetry
A five-week unit on the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Blake. Students read the poems closely, learn how form and language make meaning, compare paired texts, and build an argument about what Romantic writing does with nature, power, beauty and the self.
What this packet is. It contains 16 public resources, including this overview. The poems themselves sit in the public Romantic Poetry source pack so they are not duplicated here. The packet contains no assessment instrument. Success criteria are formative and labelled as such.
Unit outcomes
- Read a Romantic poem closely, moving from first response to a defensible claim about how it works.
- Explain how form, metre, imagery and figurative language shape meaning and feeling.
- Place poems in their historical and intellectual contexts without letting context replace analysis.
- Compare two poems around a shared question, and write an argument supported by precise evidence.
- Respond creatively and orally, and explain the choices behind a response.
The five-week shape
| Week | Focus |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Context and first readings. Revolution, industrialisation, nature and the sublime; read the four Wordsworth poems and annotate for turns and repetitions. |
| Week 2 | Close reading. The five-step method; form and metre; how a sonnet, ode or ballad organises feeling. |
| Week 3 | Language and argument. Imagery, apostrophe, symbol and paradox; build effect-first claims rather than feature lists. |
| Week 4 | Comparison and writing. Pair poems around a shared question; draft a comparative paragraph and a longer argument. |
| Week 5 | Creative and oral response. Transform a poem, deliver a spoken annotation, and take part in a seminar. |
Public resources
Outcomes and Skills
The knowledge and skills the Romantic Poetry unit builds, expressed as formative success criteria.
Open resource →Romantic Context
The historical, intellectual and literary contexts that shaped Romantic poetry, with questions that keep context tied to the text.
Open resource →Poems and Poets
A guide to the fifteen poems in the public source pack: poet, form, central concern and a route into close reading.
Open resource →Close-Reading Method
A five-step method for reading a Romantic poem closely, with a worked example and a model paragraph.
Open resource →Form and Metre
Sonnet, ode, ballad, terza rima and common metre, explained through the poems in the source pack.
Open resource →Language of Feeling
How imagery, personification, apostrophe, symbol and paradox turn feeling into argument in Romantic poetry.
Open resource →Comparing Poems
Pairings, comparative thesis frames and a model paragraph for building an argument across two poems.
Open resource →Critical Perspectives
Formalist, historicist, eco-critical, feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic readings, with questions and a model paragraph.
Open resource →Writing About Poetry
A practical guide to argument, evidence and analysis, with a model paragraph on Ozymandias and common pitfalls.
Open resource →Creative and Oral Response
A formative studio for creative transformation and a spoken annotation walkthrough.
Open resource →Seminar and Discussion
Prompts, roles and discussion moves for a whole-class seminar on Romantic poetry.
Open resource →Revision and Retrieval
A quotation bank, retrieval grid and spaced revision plan for the poems.
Open resource →Teacher Notes
Pacing, differentiation, formative feedback, text handling and access guidance for the Romantic Poetry unit.
Open resource →Sources and Provenance
What the Romantic Poetry packet contains, the public-domain status of the poems, and what is deliberately not published.
Open resource →Planning and support
Read the teacher notes for pacing, differentiation, access and formative feedback. The sources and provenance page records the public-domain status of the poems and what the packet leaves out. Differentiation is built into the teacher notes rather than published as a separate student page.
No assessment instrument. This packet does not publish confidential class briefs, scores, bands, weights, due dates, or test papers. It is a teaching and formative-feedback resource. Teachers keep their own school instruments offline.
Last reviewed: October 2026. Counts on this page match the public HTML pages in this folder.