Simon Armitage on his poem 'The Manhunt' | English Literature – Simon Armitage: Writing Poems

Suitable for teaching 14-16s. Simon Armitage analyses the themes and ideas behind ‘The Manhunt’ and considers the language it uses, accompanied by a reading of the poem. WARNING: Contains scenes some viewers may find upsetting. Subscribe for more English Literature clips from BBC Teach every Friday: https://bit.ly/BBCSubscribeTeach If you found this video helpful, give it a like. Share it with someone. Add the video to your own teaching playlists. Create an account, subscribe to the channel and create playlists for different age groups, sets and syllabuses. ===================== Simon Armitage analyses the themes and ideas behind his war poem, ‘The Manhunt’, and considers the language it uses. His comments are accompanied by a reading of the poem, mixed with images to illustrate its meaning and documentary footage from modern conflicts. Armitage talks about his inspiration for the poem, some of the unusual vocabulary within it and the responsibility he feels to write a suitable elegy for real people involved in warfare. He examines the metaphor and structural devices he uses to explore the effects of conflict from a deeply personal perspective of a real soldier. This clip is from the BBC series Simon Armitage: Writing Poems. Over the course of six short films, Simon Armitage goes behind the scenes of some of his most famous poems. Each film in Simon Armitage: Writing Poems contains a reading of the text and a visualisation of the ideas it contains, along with context given by the poet on the inspiration, imagery, structure and use of language that have gone into creating it. For more clips from Simon Armitage: Writing Poems: http://bit.ly/TeachSimonArmitage For our English Literature playlist: http://bit.ly/TeachEnglishLiterature For Class Clips users, the original reference for the clip was p011t1dd. ===================== Teaching English Literature? KS4: Students could carry out some prior research into the condition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in people who have experienced conflict. They could produce a one-page army dossier on the troubled subject of the poem, a soldier called Eddie, incorporating ideas from the text. This could help students to uncover some of the military themed language in the poem. Students could then go on to examine his wife Laura's response to the dossier (perhaps as a letter in reply to the army) and her attempts to use much more figurative language, in order to deal with the real horror of the situation. This clip will be relevant for teaching English Literature. It will be relevant for teaching poetry analysis at KS3 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and Level 3 in Scotland. The Manhunt appears in the poetry anthologies for WJEC/Eduqas and Edexcel for the new syllabus from 2015. Other works by this poet appear in the AQA post-2015 poetry anthology, and in the Edexcel, OCR and WJEC pre-2015 poetry anthologies. This clip could also be used for teaching general poetry analytics skills at KS4/GCSE/National 5. ===================== For more clips from other subjects at the BBC Teach YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/bbcteach More from BBC Learning Zone: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone More resources from BBC Bitesize: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education ===================== Subscribe to create your own customised playlists, and get notified about our latest clips. As we have them, new videos will be uploaded on the following days: Mondays: Biology, Computer Science, Music, Religious Studies Tuesdays: Drama and Performance, English Language, Maths, Physical Education Wednesdays: Languages, Media Studies, Modern Studies and PSHE, Physics Thursdays: Art and Design, Chemistry, Geography, History Fridays: Business Studies, Design and Technology, English Literature