The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Thus, is it all the more unfortunate that the Peter Pan-ish children’s poetry celebrity dominates the contemporary scene. Recently, the Poetry Foundation used some of the pharmaceutical money it received from Ruth Lilly to establish a US Children’s Poet Laureateship. According to the press release, ‘The new award aims to raise awareness that children have a natural receptivity to poetry and are its most appreciative audience, especially when poems are written specifically for them.’12 The first Laureate, to no-one’s surprise, was Jack Prelutsky, and now the Poetry Foundation’s website is graced by such work as Prelutsky’s ‘Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face’, which warns the reader that if the nose were placed ‘between your toes / that clearly would not be a treat, / for you’d be forced to smell your feet’.13 From there one can go on to read more work in the same vein by Prelutsky or even more trivial work by his acolytes such as Dave Hawley’s ‘My Doggy Ate My Homework’.

  Since the death of Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky is unquestionably the chief celebrity in the world of children’s poetry in the USA. Like the celebrity ‘children’s laureates’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Sorby discusses in Schoolroom Poets – ‘Longfellow, Whittier, Riley, and Field’ – Prelutsky and his compatriots manufacture a child’s perspective that adult readers can easily adopt as their own perspective on childhood. And like those former children’s laureates, they cultivate their fame and celebrity by performing the same shtick for their adoring audiences. Such performances carry a lot of power in creating, perpetuating and reinforcing contemporary views of childhood. Karen Glenn, in her Poetry Foundation feature on Prelutsky (entitled ‘Never Poke Your Uncle with a Fork’) cites a list of adjectives that have been used to describe Prelutsky’s poetry, but these adjectives might just as well describe the nature of children and childhood assumed by readers of the poems:

  consider some of the actual words that critics have used to describe his (almost countless) poetry books for children: zany, charming, irreverent, gothic, tongue-in-cheek, surreal, rich, varied, rib-tickling, silly, playful, wacky, inventive, whimsical, preposterous, frivolous, hilarious, and pure fun. Not to mention WEIRD and BIZARRE!

  Then think about the ways that reviewers and interviewers have described the 66-year-old Prelutsky himself: a child in an adult’s body, a boy who never grew up, a daydreamer.14

  The mythology of the childish adult (most often a boy-man) as uniquely able to address the literary needs of children has, of course, a long history. And the importance of nursery rhymes, nonsense and verse from the oral tradition for children’s poetry cannot be overestimated. But Prelutsky is the leading practitioner of what Joseph Thomas has termed ‘domesticated playground poetry’, in which the subversive, anarchic energy of children’s oral tradition is tamed and endlessly recycled by a series of entrepreneurs from Longfellow to Prelutsky.

  The preponderance of lightweight (as opposed to light) verse wouldn’t be so troubling if it were not for the distinguished and honourable tradition of humorous and nonsense verse read by children. The best comic verse, from the work of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll to more recent work by poets such as Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl or Margaret Mahy, is always aware of the darkness that gives nonsense its power. Grappling as it does with serious subject matter – mortality, authoritarianism, vanity and, most of all, with the arbitrary nature of language – poets in the tradition of Carroll and Lear tend to risk more than the Prelutskys of the world. While the latter play it safe, the masters of nonsense tend to go out on a limb, as it were, as in Lear’s ‘There Was an Old Person of Slough’,

  Who danced at the end of a bough;

  But they said, ‘If you sneeze,

  You might damage the trees,

  You imprudent Old Person of Slough.’15

  Lear’s use of understatement serves to defuse and emphasise the Person of Slough’s precarious predicament. The very word ‘slough’ itself suggests both that the Person will find himself in the swamp, perhaps even in the ‘Slough of Despond’, and also that the Person has cast caution to the wind by sloughing off prudence so that he himself has become dispensable. It would certainly seem so to ‘they’, whose main concern is the damage to the trees.

  Less indeterminate than ‘purer’ forms of nonsense, cautionary verse is often seemingly subversive in the service of inculcating conventional morality and proper behaviour. When this conservative aim – the ‘moral’, if you will – is most obvious, potentially powerful verse becomes tame. When I was growing up, a particular favourite in my family was Gelett Burgess’ 1900 etiquette manual, Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants. The children in my family, of course, delighted in the transgressions of these miscreants, but we were not fond of the heavy-handed closure of the poems soliciting our good behaviour:

  The Goops they lick their fingers,

  And the Goops they lick their knives,

  They spill their broth on the table-cloth –

  Oh they lead disgusting lives!

  The Goops they talk while eating

  And loud and fast they chew;

  And that is why I’m glad that I

  Am not a Goop – are you?16

  Poems in which children’s misdeeds are celebrated and punished extravagantly, as in Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (1845) or the cautionary verses of Hilaire Belloc, proved to be preferable to tamer offerings such as those of Ogden Nash. Sometimes, however, we loved the quieter ironies of a poem like A. A. Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ (from When We Were Very Young, 1924) because the adult–child role reversal appealed to us in relatively unthreatening ways, and it was liltingly musical at the same time. While we were too old to have enjoyed Maurice Sendak’s Pierre (1962) as children, we certainly found ourselves enjoying it with our children, either in a call-and-response reading of the Nutshell Library book, in which the child would supply the ‘I don’t care!’ refrain, or in the delightful Carole King musical settings.

  Nevertheless, I suspect that children are remarkably adept at detecting that the subversiveness of certain poems is the sugar that helps the medicine go down. Ever since the brilliant parodies of didactic verse by Lewis Carroll in the Alice books (1865 and 1871), critics have perpetuated a reductive opposition between ‘bad old’ moralistic verse and the liberating subversiveness of nonsense, but poetry really isn’t an either/or game. The verse we encourage children to read has more to do with our constructions of childhood than it does with actual children’s needs and preferences.

  Whatever else you might say about it, didactic poetry, in which an adult poet overtly rather than covertly aims at instruction, was certainly intended to foster the well-being of children and was concerned with the adults they would become, as well as for their immortal souls. At its best, as in Watts’ Divine Songs or the early nineteenth-century work of Ann and Jane Taylor, it respects children’s capacity for negotiating the sonic and figurative pleasures of language. While clearly subject to divine ordinance and the authority of adults, the child addressed in these poems is capable. In the opening poem in Watts’ Divine Songs, ‘A General Song of Praise to God’, the speaker poses the question:

  How glorious is our Heavenly King,

  Who reigns above the Sky!

  How shall a Child presume to sing

  His dreadful Majesty?17

  The poem concludes that the child’s ‘first offerings’ are no more presumptuous than those of men or angels: ‘Th’ eternal God will not disdain / To hear an infant sing’:

  My Heart resolves, my Tongue obeys,

  And Angels shall rejoice

  To hear their mighty Maker’s praise

  Sound from a feeble voice.18

  After Watts, we find in the poems of Ann and Jane Taylor the bodily rhythms of ‘Baby’s Dance’ (‘Dance little baby, dance up high, / Never mind baby, mother is by’) that later poets such as Christina Rossetti would develop with great skill, or cautionary tales delivered with panache and humour.19 The linguistic inventiveness of
Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) demonstrates a wide range of poetic language (despite her questioning the appropriateness of poetry for the young) that extends beyond the regular metres of previous male practitioners.

  Though it sometimes adopted a child’s voice, poetry before the middle of the nineteenth century spoke, for the most part, to the child. After the first half of the century, poets more and more spoke for the child, seeking ‘authenticity’ through a form of ventriloquism. They concerned themselves more with capturing the child’s perspective than with the way poems work. A poem, as William Carlos Williams famously noted, is a ‘small (or large) machine made of words’:

  When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them – without distortion which would mar their exact significances – into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes.20

  Notably, ‘significances’ is plural in this formulation, but in children’s poetry the notion of the authenticity of the child’s voice or experience is directed towards a single significance. Language plays second fiddle to the attempt by the poet to masquerade as a child or the child’s closest ally. Thus, it is typically considered a ‘breakthrough’ in the progress narrative that Robert Louis Stevenson’s chief innovation in children’s poetry was the creation of an ‘authentic’ child’s voice. But on what basis is the judgment of authenticity made? Stevenson’s child in A Child’s Garden of Verses, in the words of the valedictory poem, ‘To Any Reader’, ‘is but a child of air / That lingers in the garden there’.21 Sickly, pampered, occasionally naughty but too docile to throw even so much as a temper tantrum, Stevenson’s child speakers reinforce a regulatory adult agenda more insidiously than the overtly didactic Divine Songs of Watts. While Stevenson insists on the importance of imaginative play, stories and flights of fancy, there is something a little too pleasant about it all – something just a little treacly. Rudyard Kipling’s wicked parody of Stevenson, ‘A Child’s Garden’ (from The Muse Among the Motors (1919)) targets Stevenson’s excesses brilliantly (though it must be noted that Kipling was quite fond of Stevenson’s work):

  Now there is nothing wrong with me

  Except – I think it’s called T.B.

  And that is why I have to lay

  Out in the garden all the day.22

  While Stevenson may leave us only halfway down the treacle well, if not well in, his primary address is to the spectral child that has grown up and gone away. The reader can’t lure this child outside the book.

  Compare Stevenson’s speaker in ‘The Land of Counterpane’ with the child who speaks Randall Jarrell’s 1949 poem for adults ‘A Sick Child’. (It seems likely to me that Jarrrell, who undoubtedly grew up with Stevenson’s poems, mounts a critique of Stevenson’s brand of sick child in his poem.) Stevenson’s child revels in the power his sickness confers upon him:

  When I was sick and lay a-bed,

  I had two pillows at my head,

  And all my toys beside me lay,

  To keep me happy all the day.

  And sometimes for an hour or so

  I watched my leaden soldiers go,

  With different uniforms and drills,

  Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

  And sometimes sent my ships in fleets

  All up and down among the sheets;

  Or brought my trees and houses out,

  And planted cities all about.

  I was the giant great and still

  That sits upon the pillow-hill,

  And sees before him, dale and plain,

  The pleasant land of counterpane.23

  In Jarrell’s ‘A Sick Child’, a similar child speaker entertains a more philosophical view of the imagination’s power, one which is more disturbing than pleasant:

  The postman comes while I am still in bed.

  ‘Postman, I say, what do you have for me today?’

  I say to him. (But really I’m in bed.)

  Then he says – what shall I have him say?

  ‘This letter says that you are president

  Of – this word here; it’s a republic.’

  Tell them I can’t answer right away.

  ‘It’s your duty.’ No, I’d rather just be sick.

  Then he tells me there are letters saying everything

  That I can think of that I want for them to say.

  I say, ‘Well, thank you very much. Good-bye.’

  He is ashamed and walks away.

  If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want.

  I want . . . I want a ship from some near star

  To land in the yard, and beings to come out

  And think to me: ‘So this is where you are!

  Come.’ Except that they won’t do,

  I thought of them . . . And yet somewhere there must be

  Something that’s different from everything.

  All that I’ve never thought of – think of me!24

  Stevenson’s sick child, like Jarrell’s, would ‘rather just be sick’ and uses his imaginative play to confirm his position as an invalid, his egocentrism transforming him into ‘a giant’ who is ‘great’ but nevertheless ‘still’. Indeed, invalidism is equated with pleasure, or, rather, with the ‘pleasant’. Jarrell’s sick child is ultimately confronted with the limitations of his passivity and egocentrism, and wishes to be imagined by something outside the self. That Jarrell’s poem was not originally written for children doesn’t preclude the possibility that it may speak to children in more meaningful ways. It poses metaphysical questions about the nature and power of the imagination that go beyond Stevenson’s more limited assertion that imaginative play can make being sick in bed more enjoyable.

  While there’s undoubtedly some inherent sentimentality in the trope of the sick yet imaginative child, in the nostalgic appeal of recreating a child that has ‘grown up and gone away’, there is also in contemporary poetry a narrowing of what is permissible in terms of poetry’s emotional range. For late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century children, light comedy is all the rage, but tenderness and genuine sentiment are often in short supply. One thing that can be done to broaden the range of poetry available is to establish a high level of critical discourse surrounding children’s poetry. That children’s poetry has greater status in the UK may be attributed not only to greater institutional support, but to the ongoing critical conversation about children’s poetry that took place in the journal Signal (1970–2003). The provocative essays that appeared as part of the Signal Award for Poetry sparked interest and debate about the neglected genre. The Lion and the Unicorn Award for excellence in North American poetry (for which I have served as a judge for three years) is an attempt to begin an analogous conversation on this side of the Atlantic. Recently, there have also been a number of important books that discuss poetry and its relation to children, including Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets (2005), Joseph Thomas’ Poetry’s Playground (2007) and cultural historian Joan Shelley Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007). While there are a number of awards among the education-oriented disciplines that call attention to excellent books, these are not usually accompanied by a body of literary criticism that attempts to articulate excellence in children’s poetry.

  There is also the perennial rhetoric bemoaning the absence of serious engagement with poetry and, for that matter, serious literature, in the age of mass media and the internet. Again, the discourse in the USA is generally more alarmist and sensationalist than it is in the UK. In an interview with Lara Saguisag, poet Michael Rosen notes that he has been able to use the mass media successfully to promote poetry, proposing the concept of an ‘inter-media-ated world’, made possible by state-run rather than corporate-sponsored media: ‘I know in the States, they sort of feel that TV is this foul, commercial, gutter-stuff.
In this country there’s a slightly different attitude. TV isn’t the enemy. I think it’s possible in Britain to live in an intermediate world without compromising yourself.’25