Every year, students ask the same question: how do you revise for a section where you cannot see the poems in advance? The answer is that you revise the skill, not the content. Unseen poetry is the one part of the exam you get better at by doing, not by learning, and a little regular practice makes an enormous difference. Here is how to revise it.
Revise the method, not the poems
Since there is nothing to memorise, your revision is really rehearsal. Learn the reading method until it is automatic: read twice, find the poet's feeling, spot any shift, annotate the methods, then argue. Learn the essay structure until you can shape an answer without thinking. When the method is second nature, any poem becomes manageable, because you always know what to do first.
Build a toolkit of techniques and effects
You cannot predict the poem, but you can prepare the tools. Make sure you can confidently recognise and analyse the common features: imagery, personification, alliteration and other sound effects, enjambment and caesura, rhyme and rhythm, and structural choices like a volta or a circular form. More importantly, practise linking each one to an effect, because naming a technique earns little, but explaining what it does earns a lot. A ready toolkit means you are never staring at a poem with nothing to say.
A simple weekly routine
Once or twice a week, take a poem you have never read, spend five minutes annotating it, then write a timed answer. Occasionally practise the comparison with a second poem. Mark yourself against the criteria and fix one weakness each time. Twenty minutes of this a week, kept up over a term, will do far more than a single long session the night before.
Build your routine using the method, the structure guide, the practice questions and a worked model answer.