Why I'm Here
While I’ve spent much of my life reading and writing about children's literature, I’ve concentrated on two specific kinds of it: picture books and novels. I haven’t done much thinking about poetry for children since I published a few essays about it back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, near the beginning of my career as a critic of children’s literature. My intention in this Substack is to explain why and to try to make up for that absence.
So first, why no further work on poetry? While the subtitle of my book The Hidden Adult claims that what it is doing is “defining children’s literature,” almost none of the texts it considers are poems, and I even offer an explanation for why they are absent. The explanation hinges on my insistence that the book focuses on what adults write specifically for young readers. Much of the poetry that appears in books identified as collections of poetry for children was not originally written or published specifically for children.
But because many books exist that identify themselves as poetry for children even though much of what they contain what not originally produced for children, that seems like a pretty sizeable exception. Why did I make a decision about what to focus on that left poetry out? Why focus mainly on what was identified as having been written specifically for children?
I did so because, unlike the many children’s literature scholars working in fields like education, information science, and child psychology, I lack the professional expertise that considers how children think and act which specialists in those fields claim and base their considerations of children’s literature on. As an academic, I was trained as a literary scholar. While many of the students I taught in the children’s literature courses I once offered were enrolled in programmes that were training them to be teachers, librarians, or day-care workers, the courses were being offered as literature courses in the English department I belonged to. I am an expert in literature, not in childhood. I am more interested and more able to explore the literary characteristics of what adults write for children than I am to consider how children do or might or should respond to that writing.
Beyond that, however, my personal interactions with my own children and grandchildren and with other children I have known make me suspicious of the generalizations about children that many teachers, librarians, parents and other adults base on their often incomplete or faulty understanding of the work of specialists in disciplines like developmental psychology. For that matter, those specialists have often arrived at faulty generalizations about how children think and act in various ages and stages, generalizations they have based on limited interactions with specific young people and ignore the cultural and environmental circumstances that might have help shape those young people and are unlikely to apply generality to all children everywhere. Indeed, ongoing scholarship by later scholars in the same fields often points out how unsound such generalizing turns out to be. But many parents, teachers and others who have children in their lives often tend to ignore what they know about the individual children they interact with in favour of their unconsidered acceptance of these unsound generalizations. I am wary enough of unsound generalizing about children that I make a determined effort in my thinking on children’s literature to avoid it.
But while generalizations about human groups like, say, women or Asians—or children—are rarely if ever true for all women or Asians—or children—it is possible to understand quite a bit about how any given book or TV show invites its readers to viewers to interact with it and understand it. To offer one obvious example: books written in English expect that their readers will understand English well enough to make sense of them. Similarly, children’s books imply child readers with specific abilities, tastes, and assumptions about themselves and others. Not surprisingly, then, the books, often written by people with their own conscious or unconscious generalizations about children, might well represent generalizations about child readers and might well encourage the readers to think of themselves as being like those generalizations. Indeed, my work as a literary critic exploring children’s literature often focuses on identifying such generalizations.
But since many of the poems in collections of “children’s poetry” were not written specifically with children in mind, they could not possibly imply such generalizations. They could not possibly be encouraging children to think of themselves as being childlike in specially generalized ways. I decided to leave them out of The Hidden Adult.
But then what sense could I make of all those anthologies that included poems not originally written for children but that nevertheless had titles like A Children’s Treasury of Poems or A Child’s Book of Poems or Poems Every Child Should Know? Was the audience the poems in such collections imply actually unlike the audiences usually implied by writing specifically produced for children? In The Hidden Adult, I outlined a wide range of shared characteristics of that writing. Did the poems in collections of poetry for children not share those characteristics also even when they weren’t originally intended for children?
The Hidden Adult might itself suggest an answer. At one point in it, I do suggest that one poem often included in anthologies of poems for children, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” does in fact “share a number of the characteristics” (94). I also describe that poem as “a well-known and, to my mind, quite typical poem for children” (94). While Stevenson himself did identify the poem as being for children by including it in a volume titled A Child’s Garden of Verses, I have to acknowledge that it strikes me as quite typical not just of poems written specifically for young readers but also of much if the poetry not specially intended for youngsters that appears in collections of poetry labelled as being for children—at least when read in the context of those collections.
That raises the question of how the poems in such collections came to be selected for inclusion in them. Might they seem typical because editors consciously or unconsciously were choosing poems that could be read as possessing these typical characteristics of children’s literature and thus as implying conventionally childlike readers? Or if not, just what was making editors choose poems as being suitable for collections named as being poetry for children? Furthermore, a quick browse through a number of such anthologies showed me how often they included either the same poems or similar poems by the same authors—poems not originally defined as being specifically for children. Even the mere fact of their ongoing appearance in different collections suggests there is something about them that can be considered child-appropriate. So what might it be?
Here I am, then, beginning to try to answer that question. What makes poetry for children poetry for children?