The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Notes

  1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Granada, 1977), p. 161.

  2. Warren W. Wooden, Children’s Literature and the English Renaissance, ed. Jeanie Watson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 1–22.

  3. A. L. de Saint-Rat, ‘Children’s Books by Russian Émigré Artists: 1921–1940’, Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 11 (Winter 1989), 92–105.

  4. The book can be viewed online at www2.kb.dk/elib/mss/stampe//index-en.htm (accessed 19 June 2009).

  5. Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw. Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

  6. McCloskey conceived Make Way after working on murals of Boston. Leonard S. Marcus, Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (New York: Dutton, 2002), pp. 110–12.

  7. ‘Breaking the Binding: Printing and the Third Dimension’, Beinecke Library exhibit, curated by Timothy Young, Yale University, 2006.

  8. See Kit Williams, Masquerade (London: Cape, 1979); Martin Handford, Where’s Wally? series (London: Little, Brown, 1987– ), republished as Where’s Waldo? in North America; Walter Wick and Jean Marzollo, I Spy series (New York, 1992– ); and Norman Messenger, Imagine (London, 2005). Barbara McClintock’s Adéle & Simon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), relatedly, borrows from famous French paintings to construct fin-de-siècle Parisian city tableaux, each containing scavenger-hunt clues.

  9. See Pauline Baynes (ill.), The Song of the Three Holy Children (London: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Krensky and Bonnie Christensen, Breaking into Print: Before and After the Invention of the Printing Press (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), and Gabrielle Gern and Rebecca McBride Tröhler, Prinz Wolf: Ein Märchen (Lucerne and Freiburg: Rex Verlag, 2000).

  5 The fear of poetry

  Richard Flynn

  Critics in children’s literature studies, by and large, tend to ignore children’s poetry, but one can hardly blame them. Exciting and innovative work appears fairly often in fiction, many picture books offer enticing visual and literary pleasures, and there are several non-fiction works for young people that are sophisticated and illuminating. But, with some notable exceptions, the vast bulk of children’s poetry published today is goofy, sentimental or recycled from days of yore. As I write, the most recent children’s poetry bestseller list from the Poetry Foundation (a spin-off of Poetry magazine in Chicago) contains, besides work by Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, primarily anthologies, such as Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose: One Hundred Best-Loved Verses (2005) and A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children (2005) edited by Caroline Kennedy. Caroline is, like her mother, a celebrity anthologist, and Mary Engelbreit is a franchise. This is, for the most part, the kind of fare one encounters at the large chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble.

  This market-driven narrowing of the genre is a shame because children’s poetry is historically an expansive body of work. Until recently, the distinction between poetry for children and poetry for adults has been usefully blurred: prior to the late twentieth century, poetry anthologies for children tended to include verse traditionally considered ‘adult’, as well as an eclectic mixture of light verse, nonsense verse, narrative verse, along with lyric poetry. Additionally, children’s formal encounters with poetry in school tended to place more emphasis on the poem than on the genre itself or the individual poet. Older pedagogies that focused on the memorisation and individual and choral recitations of poetry served to emphasise the sonic and performative aspects of verse over print-based texts geared towards exercises in analysis and comprehension. And, certainly, the poetry generated by children themselves – nursery rhymes, playground rhymes and other performance-based poetry – forms the basis of early and largely positive experiences with poetry, emphasising pleasurable and often interactive experiences with poetic language.

  But today, in the United States and to a lesser extent in Great Britain, children’s poetry is considered a marginal subset of children’s literature, so marginal that the Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (2001) has no entry for the genre of poetry, despite the fact that the well-known children’s poetry scholar Morag Styles is one of its general editors. While poetry plays a larger role in more pedagogically oriented disciplines, such as education, there the traditions of poetry in English are often viewed with hostility. And while poetry is seen as something children might easily learn to write, rarely are they encouraged to enjoy reading it, or memorising it, or performing it. A large part of the problem stems from a reluctance to say what poetry is. According to one well-known college textbook for prospective elementary teachers, ‘There is an elusiveness about poetry that makes it defy precise definition. It is not so much what it is that is important, as how it makes us feel.’1

  Alongside this amorphous definition of poetry is a growing insistence among language arts educators that children’s poetry not only exists in a world apart from poetry for adults, but that, for children, a separate poetry is preferable. Perceiving some disdain for poetry for children among those who value ‘real’ poetry, Glenna Sloan in her 2001 article ‘But Is It Poetry?’ champions a separate children’s poetry, but she poses and answers a rhetorical question that dismisses fundamental aesthetic concerns: ‘What is poetry? Who’s to say?’2 The defence of a children’s poetry that excludes poetry for adults is often couched in arguments for children’s preferences. Paradoxically, this respect for children’s preferences is often disregarded in pedagogical settings. Sylvia Vardell cites studies from 1974, 1982 and 1993 that show that children prefer narrative verse and verse with rhyme and metre. These studies also conclude that children dislike free verse and haiku; nevertheless, free verse and haiku are the very kinds of poetry preferred by teachers, if not by children.3 At a presentation I gave at an American national teachers’ organisation in 2003, in which I advocated musicality as the salient quality of the best contemporary children’s verse, an audience member seemed almost offended by that notion and insisted that she did not permit her elementary students to use rhyme in the poetry she asked them to write. It became clear from several responses that poetry pedagogy in schools almost always involves creative writing instruction and very seldom advocates reading or performing poetry for pleasure.

  The aforementioned teacher forbade her students to use rhyme, she said, because it ‘gets in the way of their self-expression’. Such attitudes seem to substitute immediate gratification (the teacher’s more than the child’s) for the responsible attitude advocated by poet John Mole: ‘a notion of poetry for children which puts poetry first – for the sake of the children and the adults they will become’.4 Mole, who is a gifted poet for children, advances an argument that seems to be more prevalent in Great Britain than in the USA. Perhaps because of the longer history and greater institutional support for poetry in Britain, Mole’s argument that children’s poetry should not be separated off from the world of poetry in general is more persuasive than it would be to an American audience. Nevertheless, the question remains as to why contemporary scholars and readers actively ignore poetry, to the point where it seems to have been consigned to the margins of children’s literature.

  Several answers suggest themselves. First, the definition of poetry compounds the problem of defining children’s literature itself in that so much of what might be considered ‘children’s’ poetry, from nursery rhymes to Robert Frost, was never composed specifically for a child audience. Second, notions about the elevated status of poetry as a genre have tended to foster a view of poetry as the preserve of the expert, or even as inherently elitist. Finally, because poetry is the genre where language itself is foregrounded, its potential power can be frightening. Paradoxically, that fear is based on the very versatility of language and its potential to multiply rather than foreclose meanings.

  The fear of poetry in the twenty-first century, then, is intimately connected with the fear of play, particularly the fear of serious language play. Language as it
is being learned by children (or at least as it is being taught to them) has increasingly been circumscribed by insisting that it should serve primarily to steer the youngsters towards approved modes of consumption and ‘competency’. While we devalue serious language play, we overvalue serious business. Linguistic competency is measured by the achievement of ‘functional’ literacy, which is ‘mastered’ for narrowly utilitarian ends, and that ‘mastery’ is measured by increasingly standardised tests in schools that have, for the most part, jettisoned poetic language, along with the rest of the arts, from their curricula. Contemporary culture reacts as the ‘other bats’ do to the protagonist of Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet (1964). When the Bat-Poet discovers poetry and then tries to interest the other bats in it, they say to him, ‘When you say things like that, we don’t know what you mean.’5

  More often than not, it is the ‘other bats’ who define curricula that either ignore poetry or relegate it to the periphery, disregarding its potential for encouraging linguistic growth and fostering interpretive skills. I don’t mean to dismiss or disregard the pedagogical function of poetry for the young. The history of children’s poetry, like the history of children’s literature, is inextricable from its pedagogical context. But our pedagogies are at odds with poetry’s potential to encourage language as exploration. Poet Lyn Hejinian writes of the child’s relationship to language:

  We discover the limits of language early, as children . . . Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a shift, analogous to parallax in photography, occurs between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement that leaves a gap.6

  This passage is from Hejinian’s well-known essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in which she argues for a poetics aimed at generating multiple meanings as opposed to a poetics aimed at foreclosing meaning. In pedagogical terms, this means the resistance to a pedagogy directed towards a single correct answer. That ‘single answer’ pedagogy holds sway today might well be traced to the influence of the New Critical reading strategies that have trickled down to our schools. The New Criticism was a mid-twentieth-century formalist critical theory that insisted on the autonomy of the text in order to reveal its complexities, without recourse to extratextual considerations such as biography, historical contexts and reader response. As early as 1949, in her prescient book-length meditation The Life of Poetry, poet Muriel Rukeyser attributed the fear of and resistance to poetry to the New Critics’ ‘treatment of language’ that

  gives away their habit of expecting units (words, images, arguments) in which, originating from certain premises, the conclusion is inevitable. The treatment of correspondence (metaphor, analogy) is always that of a two-part equilibrium in which the parts are self-contained.

  ‘The critics of the “New” group’, she writes, carry the ‘rigid consequences’ of Emerson’s theory of language as ‘fossil poetry’ to absurd extremes, seeing ‘poetry itself as fossil poetry’.7

  In ‘The Fear of Poetry’, the opening section of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes, ‘In speaking about poetry, I must say at the beginning that the subject has no acknowledged place in American life today’:

  Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives.

  Do you remember the poems of your early childhood – the far rhymes and games of the beginning to which you called the rhythms, the little songs to which you woke and went to sleep?

  Yes, we remember them.

  But since childhood, to many of us poetry has become a matter of distaste.8

  This passage from Rukeyser spells out a paradox, a seemingly impossible contradiction that remains as true now, early in the twenty-first century, as it did in the middle of the twentieth: we do remember, however atavistically, ‘the far rhymes and games of the beginning’, the rhythms and little songs that were part and parcel of our earliest embodied experience with language as it is being learned. And yet, argues Rukeyser, the ways in which our bodily beginnings were once allied with our nimble intelligence have been elided, erased, reduced to the simple. We might say it is as simple as child’s play, if only the linguistic and physical play of children weren’t complex. In his fascinating study From Two to Five (1925), Kornei Chukovsky argues that children between those ages are ‘linguistic geniuses’. Although he indicates that, as the heightened cognitive activity associated with language acquisition fades, the intense need for ‘creative activity with words’ passes, he nevertheless spells out a connection between the imaginative activity of children ‘from two to five’ and the potential richness of adult imaginations. The job of children’s poets, he writes, is to ‘adapt our writing to the needs of the young’ while at the same time to ‘bring the children within reach of our adult perceptions’.9

  In most accounts of the history of children’s poetry we find a narrative of ‘progress’, in which, sometime during the nineteenth century, children’s poetry moves from instruction to delight, ‘from the garden to the street’, from the ‘adult-centred’ to the ‘child-centred’, from the bad old days of memorising and reciting poems to the good new days of free children and free verse. Typically, this narrative insists, children’s poetry (to an even greater extent than children’s fiction) changes as Puritan (and puritanical) constructions of childhood are ‘liberated’ by Romantic and post-Romantic constructions of the child. Coexisting alongside this progress narrative is a nostalgic narrative of decline: people, including children, used to read and recite and enjoy poetry which, in its more popular manifestations, both served a civic function and provided emotional and intellectual sustenance.

  While the better accounts of this progress narrative, such as Morag Styles’ From the Garden to the Street (1998), are relatively nuanced, there is nevertheless an aesthetic assumption that ‘moral instruction’ – even that allied with a tender rather than severe view of children, such as in many of Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs (1715) – was replaced (fortunately) by more child-centred and child-friendly poetry, beginning with the Romantics. In addition to the growing popularity of narrative verse, humour and nonsense by the end of the nineteenth century, the supposedly child-centred lyricism practised with great skill by Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) may be seen as ushering in a strain of sentimental nostalgia, circumscribing children’s lyric poetry in a way that represents a diminution rather than an expansion of its range and possibilities.

  In any event, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as critic Angela Sorby argues in her book Schoolroom Poets (2005), nineteenth-century equations of poetry as natural to childhood, with ‘poetry as a form of childhood’ (along with the powerful institutions that promoted and perpetuated those notions), helped bring about the ‘infantilization’ of the genre itself. ‘In the splintered, niche-driven world of middle-class popular culture’, writes Sorby, ‘poetry has maintained a toehold in America as a children’s genre, supported by the institutions of children’s publishing, elementary schools, and libraries’.10 The forms of children’s poetry that dominate today are cute and sentimental picture-book poetry aimed at the parents of babies, humorous verse often written by lesser practitioners, or the institutionally manufactured and apparently highly marketable novel-in-verse. For every able poet who has worked in these contemporary genres – a Valerie Worth, a Dr Seuss, a Karen Hesse – there are annually scores turning out volumes of derivative junk.

  An expansive view of children’s poetry could serve to counteract the institutionalised status quo. Such a view that recognises the value of both the serious and the whimsical, that recognises poetry as a social as well as a solitary pleasure, seems best designed to promote a lifelong love of poetry. Calling for a more expansive anthology of children’s poetry, Joseph Thomas observes that such an anthology ‘would be one in which various and sometimes incommensurate poetries exist in dialog with one anothe
r. This arrangement would allow a child – a beginning reader – to start her reading experiences with as heterogeneous a conception of poetry as possible.’11 This expansive view of poetry is intimately related to a view of children that recognises them as capable of enjoying a wide range of literature. Of course children enjoy what Seuss’ Cat in the Hat calls ‘lots of good fun that is funny’, but that isn’t all there is to poetry. The most meaningful experiences with poems come from living with them for a long time, internalising their rhythms and music, and pondering the conundrums they often pose. So, although it is counterintuitive, many of today’s teachers, anthologists and even some children’s poets insist that children’s poetry must be instantly accessible and confined to subjects that adults have decided are ‘relevant’. While anthologies for children have traditionally included poetry intended for adults, there is, at least in the United States, a kind of separatist movement regarding poetry for the young. Perhaps this movement is a reaction to ‘prestige’ anthologies such as Elizabeth Sword’s A Child’s Anthology of Poetry (1995) and Gillian Avery’s The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children (1994), in which the selection criteria for poets seem to be that they are canonical poets for adults. These anthologies are well intended in their desire to avoid condescending to children, but they risk boring the child reader just as much as a steady diet of easily accessible and ‘relevant’ verse.

  Anthologies may be inherently conservative, but they may also serve to broaden the aesthetic range of children’s poetry, or even to open up the canon to previously excluded voices. Great anthologies like Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither (1923) or Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney’s The Rattle Bag (1982) allow poems from a wide aesthetic range, from nursery verse to poems one might not expect to be within the range of children, to bump up against one another in unexpected ways. While those particular anthologies may be justly charged with ethnocentrism, they avoid the aesthetic sameness of anthologies like Jack Prelutsky’s Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983). The anthology’s function as an agent of canon formation may well be conservative, but it can aim at broadness and inclusiveness in more than token ways. The truly inclusive anthology, one that practises neither cultural partition, nor what poet Harryette Mullen terms ‘aesthetic apartheid’, remains to be made. Anthologies of African-American poetry, such as those by Arnold Adoff or Ashley Bryan, British-Caribbean anthologies, such as those by Grace Nichols and John Agard, or Naomi Shihab Nye’s anthologies of poems from the Middle East are all necessary steps in moving towards a culturally inclusive canon or in developing counter-canons. Nevertheless, such canons need to be constructed in tandem with one that refuses easy distinctions between poetry for children and poetry for adults. While we don’t need any more ‘Hoary Chestnuts: Poems Adults Think are Good For You’, neither do we need any more ‘Because I Could Not Pick My Nose: Poems Guaranteed to Gross Out Your Parents’. What we need and don’t yet have is a way for poems of varying registers to bump up against one another: the formal alongside the experimental, the tender alongside the humorous, the elegant argument alongside nonsense, the Anglo-American canon alongside traditionally excluded poetries, the child alongside the adult.