Because most poetry education is ineffectual, this book attempts to help the teacher stimulate student interest in poetry by (1) suggesting a rationale and objectives for teaching poetry, (2) warning the teacher to avoid those poems for which he has no personal enthusiasm and to avoid overexplaining those poems he likes, (3) urging, for example, that students frequently be allowed to choose the poetry they will study and they they occasionally be asked to say something poetically, (4) dealing with 12 approaches to teaching poetry, such as reading poems chorally or stimulating student awareness of the interrelationship between exterior and interior form, and (5) including sample pages from eight reference books for poetry to illustrate how thesebooks are arranged and how they should be used. Requested to explicate a few of their own poems for this book, poet Robert Francis uses an analogy between sports and poetry to suggest concrete approaches to teaching poetry; while Philip Booth emphasizes ways in which the teacher can communicate an understanding of the fusion of image and idea. (DD)