The History Teacher

As a Postmodern poem, “The History Teacher” is written in free verse, with no strict form, meter, or end rhyme. The poem has 22 lines broken up into six stanzas: a quatrain, a couplet, another quatrain, a tercet, and two final quintains. These inconsistent stanza breaks suggest the uneven pacing of the teacher’s course and his dismissal and underemphasis of historical violence.

Despite the initial humor of the puns, the poem is not written for the amusement of his readers or for children. The lack of rhyme supports Collins’s more serious purpose. A rhymeless poem is not sing-song; the poem is not meant to entertain children but to persuade adults. Collins makes frequent use of enjambment, or the lack of punctuation at the ends of lines that allows the lines to flow together. In this poem, the effect is to make the poem sound more like prose. By emphasizing poetic traits, the reader focuses instead on the narrative and Collins’s thematic points. Because Collins does not follow traditional poetic conventions, Collins underscores his goal to challenge mainstream ideas surrounding education, children, and violence.