As my collection of poetry collections for children grows, I become more and more aware of how British it is. More than two-thirds of the ones I’ve seen have been published in the UK, and while I haven’t done the actual work of counting how many of the poems in them were written by British poets, I’m sure that the vast majority of them were. As a presumably representative group, these collections also suggest either that a significantly larger proportion of British poets who focus on creating poetry especially for children exist or are reprinted in collections for children than there are American or Canadian ones.
Especially noteworthy, I think, is that I haven’t yet come across an American or Canadian equivalent to The Works—a series or even just one book directed specifically to teachers and to learning about poetry in schools. The closest I can find to something like The Works directed at North Americans sharing poetry with children is a series called Ambleside Poetry Online, available at AmblesideOnline, a website created by and for American parents that offers “a free homeschool curriculum that uses Charlotte Mason's classically-based principles to prepare children for a life of rich relationships with everything around them: God, humanity, and the natural world.” The site makes the poetry it recommends both available online on the site and downloadable in print in a series of volumes each off which is dedicated to groups of specific poets.
While AmblesideOnline is run by and directed at American parents, it has British origins: Charlotte Mason, whose educational principles it builds on, was a British educator and reformer around the turn of the twentieth century who, according to Wikipedia, “promoted a humanistic and highly integrative model for education which emphasized cultivating a love of learning in children as well as spiritual and moral formation.” Wikipedia goes on the say that the focus of Mason’s work on spiritual and moral education has made her “especially influential in the Christian education and homeschooling movements.” I’ll be taking a closer look at Mason’s views on poetry and how Ambleside Online makes use of it in a later posting. Meanwhile, I’ll say only that it’s instructive that the only clearly educational series of poems directed at American children that I’ve come upon assumes that the education will not be taking place in a school.
Otherwise, the American collections I’ve seen don’t necessarily assert that they are not intended for school use, and I suspect that many of them can be found in school and classroom libraries—although if they are there, it seems not all that likely that they appear there in large groups. I think that because each of them is more like all the others than not. There is little sense of a developing learning experience that requires moving from one stage to another. Indeed, the editors of each of them tend to all equally assume that they are introductions to poetry for youngsters who as yet know nothing about it. Each one of them seems designed to fill the same or a similar spot—a singular representation of what poetry is in a library that might be in a school, but might equally be in a home.
These collections reveal their potential to fill such a spot by sharing so many characteristics:
Like so many anthologies of children’s poems, they are illustrated. Many of them include a number of images in colour.
Also like children’s anthologies, many of them are divided into sections, each section containing poems on similar themes and subjects.
But while they have the appearance of anthologies for children and some of them even mention children in their titles, they often suggest more general audiences. Like Louis Untermeyer’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, a number appear to identify themselves as being intended for families or for providing children with a body of knowledge of poems that will survive their childhoods and still speak to them as adults.
Many of them actually advertise themselves as not being only for children. Harold Bloom’s collection rather arrogantly identifies itself right in its title as Stories and Poem s for Extemerely Intelligent Children of All Ages. The cover of Joanna Cole’s A New Treasury of Children’s Poetry also announces that it is “for children of all ages,” and in a blurb on the back cover of Elizabeth Hauge Sword’s A Child’s Anthology of Poetry, Olive Newton-John says, “I became so immersed in the book that I wondered if it shouldn’t be called “Everyone’s Anthology of Poetry.”
While the titles of many of these collections identify children as their audience, they are just as likely—if not more likely—to include poems not originally written specifically for children. Bloom’s Stories and Poems, Swords A Child’s Anthology, Louis Untermeyer’s The Golden Treasury of Poetry, and Gyo Fujikawa’s A Child’s Book of Poems include mostly poems not originally intended specifically for children, as do a number of collections for older children: Charles Sullivan’s Imaginary Gardens: American Poetry and Art for Young People, Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthony of Poems for Young People, and Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueder, and Hugh Smith’s Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle.
Furthermore, of all these anthologies, only this last one makes mention (in a note at the front) of students in a way that implies a classroom study of poetry that focuses on what poetry is and how to engage with it as poetry.
Beyond this one hint of school use, there appears to be no market in North American schools for collections designed specifically to aid in the classroom teaching of poetry. If poems are part of classroom education, it is not to encourager children to understand what poetry is or how to enjoy it for understand it.