Poems about Character: Using Poetry to Teach Character Complexity

As high school English teachers, I don’t think we spend enough time looking at how poets develop characters. Yet the College Board suggests its importance as it lays out the essential skills for AP Literature. In Poetry Unit 1 (Unit 2 of the year), they suggest that teachers include the characterization skill of looking at details to determine characters. Here is a list of poems about character that are perfect for helping build this skill.

poems about character for teaching character complexity in high school English

11 Poems about Character for High School English

Miniver Cheevy by Edward Arlington Robinson

Miniver is a man who laments that he wasn’t born in a different time. You can have students focus on his thoughts to examine indirect characterization.

Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a classic and one that students definitely love. (It is included in my British Poets vs. American Poets Poetry Slam and has won the competition many times.) If you want to focus on characterization in this poem, look at the relationship between Annabel Lee and the speaker.

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

This may be one of my favorite poems to use with students (I wrote more about it here in a collaborative post on Smith Teaches 9 to 12). The speaker is a father listening at the door as his daughter works on writing something. He uses metaphor to create the characters in the poem. It’s a great poem to use when discussing character values.

The Village Blacksmith by William Wordsworth

In “The Village Blacksmith,” Wordsworth uses imagery of the appearance of the blacksmith to develop his character. This is a great poem to use to introduce characterization in poetry because the inferences students can make from the smithy’s appearance are easy to make.

The Unknown Citizen by WH Auden

I love to pair “The Unknown Citizen” with dystopian texts, but it would also be great as a stand alone for a characterization unit. Students can focus on the complexity of his character through the rhetorical questions asked near the end of the poem: “Was he free? Was he happy?”

Moonlily (Marilyn Nelson)

Use this poem to focus on how actions help to create a character. The child in this poem pretends to be a horse (named Moonlily) with her friends at recess. The final lines, when they return to the classroom at the sound of the bell, develop the complexity of character.

anyone lived in a pretty how town by ee cummings

The characters in this poem are named “anyone” and “someone.” This is a great poem to focus on how diction helps to develop characters.

The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service

It seems easy to focus on the character of Sam McGee since the speaker spends a great deal of time setting up his death and subsequent cremation. However, the real complexity comes into this poem as the speaker reveals his mixed feelings about following through on his deathbed promise to his companion.

Translation for Mama by Richard Blanco

This beautiful poem gives us a mother and son who are caught between cultures. Blanco writes about himself and his Cuban-immigrant mother in both English and in Spanish. The characters in the poem are built around this cross-cultural existence.

Making a Fist by Naomi Shihab Nye

The adult speaker of the poem is looking back on a time she was car sick as a child. Her dialogue in the poem demonstrates her childish dramatic memory. You can focus on the contrast between her childhood self and her adult self to examine growth and values.

Aunt Sue’s Stories by Langston Hughes

The speaker talks of his Aunt Sue’s stories which she would tell to the “brown faced child.” This poem allows you to focus on layers of indirect characterization including the complexity behind the stories his aunt is telling him about her past.

Using Poems about Character to teach Characterization

If you are looking for more on using character poems to teach characterization, be sure to check out my mini course on teaching characterization and character complexity called Unlocking Characterization: Teaching Character Complexity in High School English. In this course, we talk about the basics of teaching characterization, writing about character and delving deep into character complexity.