Poems, of a wide variety, which are carefully selected to serve as springboards for discussion for low ability, lower-middle-class high school students can aid in developing individual student taste and interest in poetry. Viewing poetic devices within specific poems (rather than as isolated phenomena), encouraging student attempts at writing original poetry, and calling upon students to suggest some of the poems to be studied, were a few of the techniques which proved effective in this unit taught at High Point Senior High School, Beltsville, Maryland. (MF)