Teaching English at Miss Porter's School

Although I have spent most of my teaching years as a Classics professor at a number of colleges and universities, I had a  fifteen year stint as a high school teacher.  I was hired by Miss Porter's to teach English and did so for seven years. When the Classics teacher retired, I took over that program for eight years.  The English program offered American Literature to juniors and British Literature to seniors.  Both courses were chronological surveys. British Literature, for example, went from Chaucer to Tom Stoppard. It was teaching these survey courses that reinforced my knowledge of the great American and British poets; as a result, poems I had known but not internalized, became a part of my poetic repertory and have remained so.  It is as if I have a permanent library of poems stacked in shelves in my head,  a treasure of forms and rhythms, and of poetic styles.  In short, it was teaching high school English that reinforced my college major in English and prepared the foundation  I needed when I began to write my own poems. The iambic pentameters of Shakespeare and Frost echoed in many of my early poems, and I find that I still often think and write in pentameters.