As I suggested in my last post, I want to consider whether the poems by the other, mostly male poets included in the Ambleside anthology have been selected with a similar focus on describing the same or similar ways of seeing and thinking about what one sees.
These are the poets: Walter de la Mare, Eugene Field, James Whitcomb Riley, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Three of them—de la Mare, Field, and Riley—might well be present because of the extent to which they are already widely shared with children; but as I have learned to understand from my lifetime of reading and studying English language poetry, they haven’t traditionally had the status of being “important” poets, i.e., traditionally canonic ones, and therefore, traditionally, the poets most often studied in university literature courses.
The five remaining poets do have that status: Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Kipling, and Dickinson. As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, the Blake offered specifically to children tends to be only his Songs of Innocence and a few other childlike passages from other works. The selection here includes a number of those Songs, but also includes some Songs of Experience and a few of his early Poetical Sketches—but no representation of his later and larger works. The wide selection of Dickinson here includes poem after poem about specific flowers, seasons, etc, as seen in what seems much like what is conventionally imagined as childlike ways. A few poems by the remaining four poets can also often be found in children’s anthologies. But as with Blake, there is a narrow range of selections from them.
There’s usually little Wordsworth in children’s anthologies, but as with Dickinson, his poems that do appears there often focus in on responses to specific kinds of flowers, seasons, and so on, and so do most of the larger selection of his poems here. Here there are only excerpts from his longer works—and those excerpts have the same focus as the shorter poems.
There’s usually little Tennyson in children’s anthologies beyond “The Eagle” and “Sweet and Low,” a lullaby sung to a child in the long poem The Princess, but the selection here includes forty poems and offer the kind of representation of Tennyson you might expect in an anthology for a university survey course—except, again, for the absence of more complete longer works like the rest of The Princess and the Idylls.
And again, there’s a much wider representation of Kipling here than the usual one or two poems about being young—especially “If,” which is about boys becoming the right sort of men. As a result, in the additional poems here readers also get to hear from the perspective of the kind of manly men these boys become.
I conclude then, that of these five poets, one, Blake, specifically offers a childlike voice and view; that three others—Dickinson, Wordsworth, and possibly, at least in a few of his poems, Tennyson seem to have been chosen exactly because they offer responses to natural objects and events that might easily be interpreted as childlike; and that just one, Kipling, stands out as not all that interested in interaction with the natural world and only minimally childlike.
But Kipling is also the only one who offers a specifically and deliberately male point of view. His poems here suggest that the main business of being a boy is boyishness and this boyishness is a matter of learning about and then becoming the right kind of man.
This is not to say that the other poets represent femininity or girlishness. But their view of being childlike does have more in common with conventional ideas of girlishness than with conventional boyishness. Being conventional girly, I realize, is not much different from being conventionally childlike. Consciously or not, then, many of the poems here and in other children’s anthologies imply that enjoying poetry might well be identified as a girly sort of thing. Of all these poets, only Kipling manages to suggests ways in which conventionally understood boyishness might in fact have a connection with poetry. I’ll have to think further about the implications of that.
On their website, the Ambleside folks outline a poetry curriculum that moves far beyond the early school years these volumes are intended for, with lists of poets to be studied from grade six all the way through to the end of high school. I’ll consider them in a later post.