• Sushma Sati

Poetry in the contemporary classroom is often approached as an examination-oriented literary form: students identify poetic devices, explain prescribed lines, and reproduce interpretations in written answers. Such practices can secure textual familiarity, but they may also narrow poetry’s larger educational possibilities. This article proposes that the contrasting poetic visions of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Frost can provide a productive framework for rethinking poetry education. Rather than treating these poets as isolated representatives of Romanticism and modern American poetry, the article reads them as stages in a pedagogical movement from imaginative possibility to interpretive complexity and finally to an active engagement with lived reality. Shelley’s theory of imagination links poetry with sympathy, moral enlargement, and the capacity to perceive beyond immediate limitations. Coleridge’s conception of imagination introduces synthesis, reconciliation, ambiguity, and reflective interpretation. Frost, while not reducible to a simple realist, repeatedly places abstract ideas under pressure from ordinary experience, metaphor, choice, uncertainty, and human relationships. Drawing on qualitative, interpretive and comparative textual analysis, the article develops a pedagogical continuum—Imagine, Interpret, Engage with Reality. It argues that poetry can become a site in which contemporary learners learn not only what a poem means but how meaning is made, tested, revised, and related to experience. The article also considers the role of poetry in developing critical and creative thinking, empathy, reflective judgement, and student-centred learning. The proposed model is not presented as an empirical classroom intervention; rather, it offers a theoretically grounded framework that teachers may adapt for literary education.

Keywords: poetry pedagogy, contemporary classroom, Shelley, Coleridge, Robert Frost, imagination, realism, critical thinking, literary education, metaphor

"READING POETRY IN THE CONTEMPORARY CLASSROOM: FROM ROMANTIC IMAGINATION TO FROSTIAN REALISM", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 10, page no.a368-a376, October-2026, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2610040.pdf

"READING POETRY IN THE CONTEMPORARY CLASSROOM: FROM ROMANTIC IMAGINATION TO FROSTIAN REALISM", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 10, page no. ppa368-a376, October-2026, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2610040.pdf