Anne Bradstreet: Poems Lesson Plan

Humorism Personality Test

Kind of Activity:

Group Work

Objective:

Students will study Humorism, which appears in most of the poems in this section, and will identify ways it corresponds to modern personality tests.

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.2, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.6

Structure:

In all of the Quarternion poems in this section, the speaker references the four humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—and their corresponding temperaments—phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic. This taxonomy is derived from a system called Humorism, which originated in ancient Greece and persisted past Bradstreet's...