The Heuristic Elements of Poetry are conceptual tools which may aid teachers in designing a poetry curriculum or infusing poetry into any other curriculum. Like an episteme, each heuristic element represents a field of discourse with some historical basis. Music, mimesis, and catharsis are classical schools of critical response to poetry that culminate in Aristotle's Poetics. Sublimation, containing the idea of the sublime, may be traced as a classical, alchemical and psychological perspective on poetry and art. Transcendence, emerging in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, is articulated in the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists. From Mallarmé to Yeats, symbolism was a prominent poetic perspective at the transition from 19th to 20th century. By the end of the 20th century the technologies needed to publish were available to a greater part of the population than ever before.

The elements are rooted in concepts derived from the contemplation of poetry and applicable to other disciplines. Using poetics as a central motive to learning, students are encouraged to explore communication. Classrooms become host to a growing human discourse that affirms cultures and individuals. Its intent is to influence educators to approach each of their students as a potential author, capable of poetic expression.

The inclusive classroom needs to address the substantial disparity of student aptitudes, while articulating all its students' cognitive growth. A poetics curriculum would enable the consideration of a vast body of literature from a variety of standpoints -- yet upon enough common ground for informed discussion to ensue. It is a curriculum that can respond to a multicultural literature and accommodate diversity.

In the New Republic of 1916 Randolphe Bourne wrote, "Art education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste. The emphasis must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to like. We have never had a real test of whether bad taste is positive or merely a lack of consciousness. We have never tried to discover strong spontaneous lines of diversified taste. To the tyranny of the 'best' which Arnold's persuasive power imposed upon this most inquisitive, eager and rich American generation, can be laid, I think, our failure to develop the distinctive styles and indigenous art spirit which the soil should have brought forth abundantly. For as long as you humbly follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital."

For a lecture given at Columbia University in 1947, Delmore Schwartz wrote, "Is it necessary, in order to praise poets A, B, and C, to condemn poets D, E, F, G, H, and the rest of the alphabet? Perhaps it is necessary, but if we think concretely of the really shocking blunders in taste which prevail throughout literary history, then perhaps the very consciousness of these blunders can help us to arrive at a point of view in which there is no mere seesaw of praise and rejection... Shakespeare lost his popularity with Elizabethan audiences because Beaumont and Fletcher seemed to be able to turn out the same kind of thing in a slicker style... The point is that the more we know about the history of literary reputation and literary opinion, the more conscious we are of how unjust and how stupid even the greatest critics can be, the more likely we are to avoid such errors in our own experience of literature."