Assuming readers' emotional responses can inform literary analysis, this study of poetry readers featured an instructional intervention that involved modeling both cognitive and affective reading processes through a think-and-feel-aloud pedagogy. Eleventh-grade students in 2 conditions participated in a 4-week unit on reading poetry. Control group instruction focused on textual analysis and vocabulary building, whereas experimental group instruction focused on readers' personal responses, which were mapped back to textual elements. Experimental group students reported more favorable orientations to poetry and wrote longer responses to poems than control group students. Analysis of classroom discourse revealed that the experimental group participated in discussions more frequently and asked more sophisticated text-based questions while identifying with the poem's speakers.