This Land is YOUR Land

"Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song."-Bob Dylan

Grade Level: High School

Objective: Students will analyze two examples of iconic American environmental poetry, examining both their context and their portrayal of the American landscape and its people.

Today we:
-Read aloud Walt Whitman's poem "This Compost"
-Discussed Walt Whitman's relationship with Emerson and other transcendentalists, comparing and contrasting the depiction of landscape in Whitman's poetry with the descriptions of environment in Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir
-Watched a short PBS clip which showed Leaves of Grass in a more modern context
-Listened to Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen's cover of "This Land is Your Land" (as performed at Obama's presidential inauguration)
-Discussed the text of "This Land is Your Land" looking at it in the context of American literature, American history, and Guthrie's life
-Listened to an excerpt of Studio 360 about "The Land is Your Land" as an American icon