Poetry Is Priceless: Why Verse Belongs at the Heart of Your Homeschool

Christine Owens
May 5
3 min read

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost

If you’ve ever read a bedtime poem that lingered in your child’s thoughts long after lights out, you’ve experienced poetry’s quiet power. But poetry’s role in education goes far beyond charm and nostalgia—it’s neurologically essential, emotionally enriching, and cognitively stimulating. In other words: poetry is not a luxury. It’s a key ingredient in a well-rounded home education.

The Brain Is Wired for Poetry

A 2024 article by Patrick J. Kiger, The Human Brain Is Hardwired for Poetry, highlights groundbreaking research showing that the human brain responds to poetry in ways that ordinary speech or prose do not. Studies using EEGs and fMRI scans show that rhymes, rhythms, and poetic structures trigger unique bursts of brain activity—especially when those patterns culminate in surprising or emotionally rich lines.

Even when study participants had no formal training in poetic forms (such as Cynghanedd in Welsh), their brains lit up at poetic phrasing. According to Bangor University researcher Guillaume Thierry, this suggests that poetry isn’t something we learn from textbooks—it's something we instinctively recognize. It's "built in."

Why This Matters in Homeschooling

Homeschooling offers freedom to shape a rich, soulful curriculum—and poetry is the perfect tool to stretch both heart and mind. Here's how:

1. Poetry Builds Flexible Thinkers

When children engage with layered meanings, metaphor, and symbolism, they build cognitive muscles essential for problem-solving. University of Liverpool professor Philip Davis found that poetry activates areas of the brain responsible for what he calls “literary awareness”—the ability to hold ambiguity and make sense of complex ideas. This is the very skill children need to evaluate choices, shift perspectives, and think creatively.

2. Poetry Strengthens Emotional Intelligence

Reading emotionally charged poetry activates the same regions of the brain stimulated by powerful music. In a study published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, researchers found that the more emotionally moving a poem was rated, the more activity it generated in the brain’s right hemisphere—associated with empathy, emotional depth, and connection.

3. Poetry Encourages Deep Reading and Listening

Unlike quick facts or surface-level summaries, poetry invites lingering. It teaches children to slow down, savor language, and listen for what’s not being said. In a world of scrolling and skimming, that’s a revolutionary habit—and it begins with just a few stanzas a day.

4. Poetry Is Memorable

Adam Zeman, a neurology professor at the University of Exeter, notes that favorite poems are often “remembered as much as read.” Poetry sticks—sometimes for a lifetime. That means the values, insights, and beauty conveyed in verse continue to shape your child long after the lesson ends.

How to Start

You don’t need to analyze Shakespeare or teach scansion to unlock poetry’s benefits. Here are simple ways to begin:

Read aloud: Start or end your day with a poem. Choose ones with rhythm and rhyme for younger children, or thought-provoking imagery for teens. My personal favorite is tucking the kids at night, turning off the lights and reading a poem to them from out in the lit hall.
Memorize together: Choose one poem a month to learn by heart as a family. Try classics like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Swing or Langston Hughes’s Dreams.
Make it playful: Encourage children to write their own silly rhymes, nature poems, or haikus.
Tie it to other subjects: Use historical ballads in history, nature poems in science, and poetic riddles in logic lessons.

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The Bottom Line

Poetry doesn’t just educate. It awakens. Neuroscience now affirms what parents have always sensed: poems shape the heart and the mind in ways that prose cannot. So if you’re wondering whether to add poetry to your homeschool day, consider this an enthusiastic “yes.” It’s not fluff—it’s fuel.

Find 19 poems you can introduce your children to here https://www.ayearofpoetryteatime.com/post/19-short-and-fun-poems-to-introduce-your-children-to-poetry

References:

Kiger, Patrick J. The Human Brain Is Hardwired for Poetry. Updated April 16, 2024.
Davis, Philip. "The Neuroscience of Literary Awareness." Cortex, 2015.
Zeman, Adam. University of Exeter. Study on Poetry and Memory, 2013.
Thierry, Guillaume. Bangor University. Study on Cynghanedd Poetry, 2024.