Free Posters for GCSE English Literature AQA Power & Conflict Poetry Collection

If you need something to brighten up your classroom wall, then look no further.  I took a little while to create these posters – and trying to tame AI to produce something faithful to them was an uphill struggle.  

However, here are the finished items, which you can download free of charge here.  And yes, they do use AI but because that means that you and I do not have to worry about copyright issues. I see so many posters created by well-meaning teachers who have blithely used the work of others to illustrate the literature that they teach – I wanted to avoid that altogether and now technology has finally caught up with that desire!

I started with Ozymandias, which I have very fond memories of studying while I was at school. Its message is as powerful today as it was when Shelley wrote it, reminding us that even the mightiest rulers, empires and achievements are ultimately fleeting, while time and nature outlast them all.  

My teacher did some marvellous things with her voice when reading the poem out loud – and although in hindsight it may have been a little too bombastic (you should have seen her doing Charge of the Light Brigade), we enjoyed her theatricals.

I created the posters at A3 size.  They come off a bog-standard colour-enabled photocopier well, but if you are lucky enough to have a dedicated print room, they also work very well at A2.

Although I only managed to fit in extracts of Browning’s My Last Duchess and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I hope I have authentically “caught” these poems sufficiently to pique the interest of any learner wary of things older than themselves.  

Although the Duke may not be quite how you imagine him, although you may imagine a summer’s evening a little darker than how I present it (I always think of July evenings, not dart till half nine!), I hope you what you see here pleases you a little!  Before I stuck them on my wall, I passed them by a few students and colleagues.  They all loved them - even if they were just being kind!

I have managed to squeeze in all of Blake’s London and likewise all of Owen’s Exposure.  With all these posters I have tried to get a create a sense of the time in which they were written using colour and imagery (and in Blake's case an imitation of his own painting style).  Each poster is accompanied by an image of the poet as well as a very short biography.  Again, I think this is as much as any of my students will read!

I hope you enjoy these posters as much as I enjoyed creating them!  Posters available for free download here.