For many readers—adults and children alike—poetry can be challenging. Readers often find poems inaccessible, suspecting a secret meaning they cannot decode. In fact, poetry’s reliance on symbolic and figurative language opens up rather than closes off meaning, giving readers the power of personal interpretation. This unit gives students tools and strategies for approaching poetry, training them in the methods and devices poets use and equipping them to read and interpret both formal and free verse poems. It gives them continual opportunities to create poems themselves, allowing them to practice what they have learned. The poems in this unit represent a wide variety of time periods, from Kshemendra’s twelfth-century treatise on the responsibilities of poets to the work of living writers such as Sherman Alexie and Harryette Mullen. We haven’t chosen poems written specifically for children; we have instead selected poems both younger and older readers will enjoy. The poets come from many backgrounds and nations; the poets included are European, Asian, African American, Native American, and Hispanic. The poems themselves are similarly diverse; some employ precise meter and rhyme schemes, while others use free verse. Uniting them all is their engagement with language and its potential.