The Ghost of Poetry
Why is so little poetry for children being published? In the light of the relative scarcity of poetry, that questions might better be replaced by its opposite: why is poetry for children being published at all? If publishers produce so little of it that they firmly establish their lack of faith in its popularity or profitability, why publish any?
Maybe it’s because children and poetry go together like salt and pepper or, as the old song insists, like love and marriage or a horse and carriage—you can’t have one without the other. In a discussion of the lack of certainty about what constitutes “poetry for children,” Peter Hunt explains the connection between them by quoting both Neil Philip and Margaret Meek asserting that children are especially drawn to poetry because they are natural poets. Philip points out that “From the moment they can talk till the moment we finally convince them that what they have to say is not important, children are producing poetry the whole time”; and Meek concurs: “Children are natural poets, singing before they speak, metaphor-making before they prose their way to school” (Hunt is quoting Philip and Meek as referred to in Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 19790-2001, edited by Nancy Chambers). Many anthology editors echo this faith in the natural poetic ability of children—our, perhaps, their conviction that poets are inherently childlike?—in their prefaces and introductions. If that natural poetic ability exists, it would certainly support the publication of a lot of children’s poetry.
But then why the relative lack of it in what publishers, who can only survive by knowing what sells, choose to publish? If children are indeed naturally poetic, or even if a lot of adult purchasers of children’s books believe that children are naturally poetic, that obviously hasn’t transferred into an immense market for books of poetry for children, and it doesn't necessarily transfer into an automatic appreciation by children of the poetry adults write and/or choose for them.
Being cynical enough to believe that all children are as unlikely to be natural poets as all women are likely to be natural homemakers with an urge to spend their life admiring and feeding and otherwise serving men (and children), I’m more inclined to look for less utopian (or repressive) explanations. Writing in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves suggest one when they say:
A superstition has hung over from last century when there was, indeed, a practical demand for poetry for household uses, that no general publisher's Spring or Autumn list is complete without at least one volume under the heading of 'Poetry. What it is does not matter, so long as it does not run the firm into expense. And the publisher knows well enough that poetry cannot pay its printer's bills except in the form of standard text-books, nursery verse and anthologies.
What this assumes is what I know from personal experience to be true: poetry in general used to matter a lot matter than it had come to matter in 1928, and a huge amount more than it has come to matter now, almost a hundred years after 1928. As an undergraduate and then a graduate student of English literature in the nineteen sixties, I simply took it for granted that a major part of that literature that was worth studying consisted of poetry. I chose to write my doctoral dissertation on the poet Alfred Tennyson because I took it for granted that he was one of the major writers of the Victorian period but could see that he was getting less attention from scholars than I thought he deserved.
Note, though, that I thought of Tennyson as a major Victorian writer, not specifically as a Victorian poet. I had learned from the courses I had taken up to that point that the major Victorian writers were, in fact all poets (and men): not just Tennyson, but also Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. Six decades later, the major and most often studied and discussed Victorian writers are novelists, many of them not men: the Brontës, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell are right up there along with Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and, eventually, I guess, Thomas Hardy. If Tennyson and Browning are represented in university courses at all now, it’s probably by the presence the same few of their poems usually found in anthologies. The Tennyson poems that can be found most often in anthologies for children are one or two of his uncharacteristically short poems, “The Eagle,” and “Break, Break, Break,” and selections from a short list of somewhat longer ones: “Mariana,” “The Lady of Shallot,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The many hundreds of other poems Tennyson wrote, including much longer and once-considered major works like Maud, In Memoriam, and The Idylls of the King, have mostly ceased to matter.
And generally speaking, poetry in general has come to matter less than it once did, for adults as well as for children. But there’s still the ghost of a belief in its significance, a ghost still present enough for many parents, teachers, librarians and publishers to acknowledge it by including poems in what they try have on hand to offer children—yet so little present that the poetry they offer is a very small part of what they make available.
And because it’s such a small part, the few books included in that part have to represent many of the varying things poetry can be. On many publisher’s lists, then, and in many classroom and in many homes, there’s likely to be just one poetry book among the various picture books and novels—and that one book is almost inevitably a general anthology and almost inevitably contains many of the same poems as the many other similar anthologies. As Riding and Graves say, “The ideal popular anthologist is one who concerns himself only with supplying his public with what it wants”—and presumably, the public that purchases anthologies of poetry for children wants the poems it expects to be included in them, the poems they already know, and know, mostly, from other anthologies.
The existence of so many books like that make it clear that there’s a profitable potential market for such a book—but, mind you, for just one book like that, just the one poetry anthology so often found in many classrooms and houses. I have to conclude, then, that all these astonishingly similar anthologies are all competing to fill that one slot and to be that one book. I can’t think of any other explanation for why so many exist and why they are all so similar to each other. Even odder, many of these very similar books are edited by the same editors and/or come from the same publishers—I’/ll have to think about that in a later post.
One additional note about how children come to have access to books of this sort: many of the anthologies of poetry for children that I’ve been buying recently are from used book websites, and some of them come with glued-in stickers that identify them as being prizes awarded by a teacher:
Others have handwritten inscriptions that also identify them as also having been prizes, or perhaps Christmas or birthday gifts.
Choosing an individual book as a gift for an individual child you might not know all that well can be a difficult task, and that might well make a varied anthology seem like a more sensible choice—and poetry a more seriously educational one?
And besides which, poetry anthologies tend to be more obviously present-or prize-worthy. They are big and fat and chock full of poetic goodies, something much more like getting a box of chocolates than just one mere novel.