What and How to Revise for your Post 2000 Poetry exam (Edexcel A Level English Literature Component 3A: Poems of the Decade)

The Poetry exam will be your third and final English Literature exam and is worth 30% of your final grade. This article will focus on how to revise for the first part of this exam: Poems of the Decade.

Before you start, make sure you know exactly what the assessment objectives for this question are. You are assessed for:

• AO1: your ability to articulate an informed, well written essay; your use of relevant concepts and terminology.
• AO2: your ability to analyse the ways meanings are shaped in texts.
• AO4: your ability to make connections between texts.

Modern Poetry Revision Tips

1. Make a table on which you list all the set poems in this collection (there are 20) with about 5 empty columns next to your poems. Tick every time you revise a poem so that you keep track of your revision for this unit. It can be easy to miss poems – either accidentally or because there is one that you absolutely hate – so this is an easy way to keep track of how often you revise each poem.
2. Check that you have good notes and annotations on every poem. Your teacher may have asked other students to prepare presentations on certain poems which means some of your notes may not be as detailed or helpful as others. You don’t want to realise this the night before the exam.
3. There is no need to learn quotations off by heart as you will have the poem in front of you in the exam; what you do need to know is what each poem is about and the main themes. Briefly summarise what each poem is about – aim to do this in one succinct sentence and bullet point the key themes. (Remember that there may be more than one interpretation of each poem; yours may be different to other people’s, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Make sure you can prove any interpretations you have with sufficient evidence. Don’t ignore the obvious meanings though as this may leave you inadequately prepared for the exam). There are several ways to revise this information: revision cards with the poem’s name on the front and the summary/themes on the back or revision posters divided into a grid with a space for each poem are two useful ones.
4. For each theme in the poem, pick out the main ways in which the poet communicates his/her message. Ideally you want to be able to comment on at least three distinct devices or techniques with at least two examples of where the poet uses these. Try to ensure you consider structure and form as well as language and make sure you can comment on the effect of a poet’s choice of form and structure as you won’t get many marks for simply feature spotting.
5. Learn the associated terminology for this unit and know where you can apply it – it’s no good being able to define a term if you can’t comment on an example of it in a poem. The ‘look, cover, write, check’ method works well for learning definitions. You could also try sticking the definitions around your house so that you frequently see ones which you may be struggling with.
6. Print out blank copies of the poems and annotate them from memory. Compare what you have written to your class notes and fill in any gaps in another colour.
7. The themes of each poem will hopefully be the steers of the exam questions so try rewriting your poem summaries with the steer word in them (this will form a thesis for your introduction).
8. Practise responding to unseen poems; your teacher should be able to give you plenty of examples and you can access past papers on the Edexcel website. Annotate them using the What, How, Why approach (what is the poet trying to say; how are they saying it; why might they be saying it). Match these up to poems they link to in your anthology and pick out three clear comparisons you can make between the two poems.
9. Do some timed essays. You will have about an hour to write your response in the exam so get used to writing your response in this time. Try to recreate an exam environment by leaving your phone elsewhere and making sure there are no distractions. Get these marked and pay close attention to the feedback. You could also try rewriting essays you did at the beginning of the course as your comparison skills are likely to have significantly improved since then.

Exam tip: If you don’t understand the unseen poem immediately, remember that there are two questions about that poem to choose from. The steers in each question should give you a clear hint about what the poem is about so read both questions.