ABSTRACT
This chapter provides guidance on the teaching of poetry within a multimodal framework and examines implications for situated learning theory and education policy and suggests further areas for research. It explores how a re-thinking of the relationship between multimodality, poetry and poetics might inspire new forms of creativity. The simplicity of that utterance is likely to be more evident in relatively short lyric poetry and perhaps in narrative poetry than in epic, cinematographic, modernist poetry. Social semiotic theory remains important in any exploration of multimodality and poetics as the cultural zeitgeist continues to move away from a Romantic or late-Romantic conception of poetic creation. The area for research would be to measure the degree to which theoretical deliberation is useful in providing an overarching explanation of the poetic compositional process. The conventions of poetry would suggest the opposite: that these musical or quasi-musical forms are constructs for the generalized representation of patterned meaning which is 'suggestive'.
