I really enjoyed that, thank you: especially the comments about Julia Donaldson at the start. Metrically she is extremely precise and it feels almost belittling to class her simply as a children's author.
Some comments: some of the older children's literature I read as a child had more adult poetry weaved into their fabric in a way that I don't see in more modern children's books. For example, as a boy I read my way through Jennings and Darbishire: I remember one plot line which was based around on whether a prep was to write a poem or copy one out. One of the lead characters had something like 'Before we must play cricket / we need a wicket / we scored ninety-three / and then had tea'; another boy copied out Tennyson's 'Break, break, break' which was reproduced in full; the plot somehow integrated a discussion of why the second was better than the first. Similarly, when introducing my older son to classic British children's book I discovered that 1950s Billy Bunter books could have a chunk of untranslated Aeneid dumped into the text. Probably ambitious even then, though....
One thing to bring up is what I will call boys' poetry (hopefully what I mean by this will be clear). Personally my route into poetry, around the age of 10, was through poems like The Charge of the Light Brigade; The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna; Hohenlinden; Vitae Lampada: works with a clear rhythm on appealing topics and not requiring any complex emotions. They went in my head then and never left. As an adult I can recognise this as B+ `good bad verse', but they were jolly good fun as a child and a way in to a broader appreciation of poetry (and there really doesn't seem to be much in a similar register since Kipling).
I think many boys (not all, but I certainly include my younger self) are slower than girls to find books, or poetry, centred on human emotion interesting. I bounced straight off Jane Austen when I had to read her for A-level English (five daughters seeking husbands? really?) but enjoyed her hugely at 30. In terms of poetry and children, much of the British school system and literary culture seems to foreground a loose free verse focused on feeling and emotion (cf the success of Kate Clanchy's books and the poems they include). I do worry that there are lots of boys who would really enjoy poetry but are permanently put off because they are taught that it is something in tension with where their interests lie.
This was also my experience with my elder son (9 1/2 at the time) during the grim days that started in March 2020. I put learning poetry by heart on our home schooling syllabus, but the ones that `took' and went in were those in this broad register (which can also include A+ verse (e.g. Henry V speeches)).
I'm aware the above is quite boy-focused (and not all boys are the same; some boys are acutely sensitive etc etc). In my defense, I was a boy and went to a boys' school; I have brothers and sons, but no sisters or daughters, and so while I have some developed thoughts on what could, broadly, benefit 10 - 18 year old boys I have no good sense of what makes teenage girls tick.
Final point: in fairness one should note that there are a lot of popular and widely selling 'verse novels' for the YA market, although when I have looked inside these the versification didn't seem (at least to my jaundiced eye) to consist of much more than funky line-breaks.
Thanks so much Joseph! Yes Donaldson knows exactly what she's doing, she has a great ear. She makes it look easy but it isn't of course. I always find it odd that she is never mentioned in all those breast-beating "poetry never makes any money at all, even at the top" pieces because she has surely (and deservedly) made a very decent income and I don't see how you could possibly claim that she isn't a poet.
I agree with so much of this and I think what you say about the kind of verse that children find appealing is very much true of girls too, if they have the chance. It certainly was for me. I mean they might, as you say, be more receptive than the average boy (or more conditioned to feel that they should be receptive) to all the tedious form-free emoting, but I think whether they are or not is really a separate issue from whether you can enjoy listening to a good reading of the best bits of Tennyson vel sim. The "Book of 1000 Poems" has lots of examples of just the sort of thing you mean -- stirring narrative verse which sounds wonderful, is fun to say and remember and might even -- dare I say it -- actually be useful in life too. One whole section is dedicated specifically to narrative verse. Several of the poems you mention being particularly moved by as a child I was too, and I had an illustrated book of narrative verse which furnished me with a few more examples.
I think you're spot on too about how the routine place of verse of this kind in education meant that it was reflected in children's literature which was still being read even after it ceased to be true of actual schools -- this was something I commented on in the post about Antonia Forest's "school stories" before Christmas, from which I learnt many poems. I can also still recite all the verse that's quoted in both Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" and Lawrence's "The Rainbow" (Ursula in the hayloft swooning over Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable . . . ), which I read at about the same time.
I'm one of many sisters but like you, I only have boys. One is still a toddler, and of the older two one has responded quite strongly to a range of poetry since he was small. The other is more literal and less artistically-inclined. Two poems that really caught the imagination of both of them, though, were Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" and Charles Causley's "Colonel Fazackerley". There really ought to be a modern edition of the best bits of Noyes.
Have to admit that I had no idea about the YA 'verse novel' trend! Must investigate.
YA "verse" novels are very much a thing, sorry to say, as is the free "verse" novel generally. A lot of new fiction that's not selling itself as verse is written in a similar way. I can't say I understand the appeal (apart from an easy life for the writer...).
Our older son is more biddable in this direction; our younger one (now 11) read the Highwayman at school a year or so ago, and there was a period when 'Bess the landlord's daughter' was appearing whatever the situation. Funnily, they have also both enjoyed some of the `so bad it's good' bits of McGonagall; I would be hard put to analyse what *precisely* about the metre and rhyme that elevates e.g. The Tay Bridge Disaster from conventionally bad rhyming poetry to high comedy, but it had them both in stitches.
Just to jump in belatedly to this very interesting discussion to say that Ben Lerner gives an illuminating little analysis of the technical comedy of The Tay Bridge Disaster in his book The Hatred of Poetry: as I recall, he dissects it as a clash of duple and triple meter...
Thanks Victoria, I love this subject - curious to see what people come up with! The Emma Press have done some themed anthologies in recent years which might be the right age (I'm in two, so should declare an interest): https://theemmapress.com/product-category/childrens/poetry-anthologies/
Otherwise, the thing that immediately springs to mind is comic/nonsense verse. But none of my examples are exactly recent. We had Dahl's Revolting Rhymes on tape, I still remember Allan Ahlerg's 'Please Mrs Butler' (just poems in that one), Tilda can recite Belloc, I used to read lots of Spike Milligan and plenty of people who don't read poetry can still recite The Jabberwocky....
I wonder if we asked teenagers, whether they would tell us their favorite poets are songwriters. For example, consider the first verse of this song about remembered childhood:
“Please picture me in the trees / I hit my peak at seven / Feet in the swing over the creek / I was too scared to jump in / But I, I was high in the sky / With Pennsylvania under me / Are there still beautiful things?”
Song lyrics almost always end rhyme, but here end rhyme is mostly absent; instead, it uses extensive internal rhyme and assonance; the ear hears all those long Es and Is almost as a continuous rhyme when sung.
Oh yes definitely, almost all the people who are really good at rhyme (in all its varieties) are writing songs not poems these days for obvious reasons. All the same, I do think that what makes for a great song lyric is ultimately a bit different from a poem. I don't know Swift's work at all (I know, I know, last person on earth etc) but I think this is a great example for your point, not because it's a good poem (I don't think it is, as a poem, I have no idea what it's like as a song), but because, rephrased as a conventional lyric, you could find a dozen poems on exactly this highly relatable nostalgia for a childhood experience in the "Book of a Thousand Poems". (My favourite is the swinging in Thomas Hood, 'I remember, I remember', https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44387/i-remember-i-remember ) So this is a great example of song lyrics aimed -- presumably -- mainly at teenagers or young adults supplying exactly the kind of satisfaction a lyric poem might have done in a previous generation.
Right, the lyrics are always in service to the song, so they don’t necessarily work quite the same way as words on a page, but they generally use the techniques of traditional poetry, particularly rhyme, refrain, stretches of meter, etc.
It’s weird how rhyme is still so popular if we look around. For example, any show or movie involving adventure, pirates, witches, whatever — if there’s a riddle for solving the mystery or a clue to finding the treasure, it will always be rhymed. Always. Perhaps that’s just a screenwriter trope, but it shows how young people often live in a world that rhymes. It’s just adults who don’t.
Songwriters never became self-conscious about rhyme.
What a wonderful article. I studied Racine, but don’t know Fenelon. I will look for it… one of the first books read to me was “When Daisies Pied, and Violets Blue” songs from Shakespeare. The illustrations are so gorgeously beautiful
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. The songs from Shakespeare are so lovely aren't they, there are lots in the "Thousand Poem" anthology I wrote about here. Thanks for commenting.
This lovely post makes me wish I had written the critical essay I once proposed on Julia Donaldson's skill as a poet -- but probably lacked the time to write, due to the small children I was reading her to... It always amused me to notice that she had a 'hack' job writing Biff and Chip early reader books before she broke through with The Gruffalo etc. But even those required a discipline of clear narrative sentences with varied syllables. I think I also once suggested in a lecture that many of the tropes of the modern childhood poem could be found in the perfect verses of Peepo...
She's so good isn't she? And goodness, writing Biff and Chip must take discipline way beyond that of most so-called "formalist" poets, because it's a phonics reading scheme isn't it? (Vague memories of when my older ones were little.) So especially in the early books you've only got a very narrow list of phonemes you're actually allowed to use. Because of the timing of our move and my middle son's particular birth date, he sequentially did reception and Y1 in England and then "CP" (sort of like Y1, but also the first year of primary school as opposed to maternelle) in France. Fascinating contrast! Though to be fair French phonics are a lot more regular.
I really enjoyed that, thank you: especially the comments about Julia Donaldson at the start. Metrically she is extremely precise and it feels almost belittling to class her simply as a children's author.
Some comments: some of the older children's literature I read as a child had more adult poetry weaved into their fabric in a way that I don't see in more modern children's books. For example, as a boy I read my way through Jennings and Darbishire: I remember one plot line which was based around on whether a prep was to write a poem or copy one out. One of the lead characters had something like 'Before we must play cricket / we need a wicket / we scored ninety-three / and then had tea'; another boy copied out Tennyson's 'Break, break, break' which was reproduced in full; the plot somehow integrated a discussion of why the second was better than the first. Similarly, when introducing my older son to classic British children's book I discovered that 1950s Billy Bunter books could have a chunk of untranslated Aeneid dumped into the text. Probably ambitious even then, though....
One thing to bring up is what I will call boys' poetry (hopefully what I mean by this will be clear). Personally my route into poetry, around the age of 10, was through poems like The Charge of the Light Brigade; The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna; Hohenlinden; Vitae Lampada: works with a clear rhythm on appealing topics and not requiring any complex emotions. They went in my head then and never left. As an adult I can recognise this as B+ `good bad verse', but they were jolly good fun as a child and a way in to a broader appreciation of poetry (and there really doesn't seem to be much in a similar register since Kipling).
I think many boys (not all, but I certainly include my younger self) are slower than girls to find books, or poetry, centred on human emotion interesting. I bounced straight off Jane Austen when I had to read her for A-level English (five daughters seeking husbands? really?) but enjoyed her hugely at 30. In terms of poetry and children, much of the British school system and literary culture seems to foreground a loose free verse focused on feeling and emotion (cf the success of Kate Clanchy's books and the poems they include). I do worry that there are lots of boys who would really enjoy poetry but are permanently put off because they are taught that it is something in tension with where their interests lie.
This was also my experience with my elder son (9 1/2 at the time) during the grim days that started in March 2020. I put learning poetry by heart on our home schooling syllabus, but the ones that `took' and went in were those in this broad register (which can also include A+ verse (e.g. Henry V speeches)).
I'm aware the above is quite boy-focused (and not all boys are the same; some boys are acutely sensitive etc etc). In my defense, I was a boy and went to a boys' school; I have brothers and sons, but no sisters or daughters, and so while I have some developed thoughts on what could, broadly, benefit 10 - 18 year old boys I have no good sense of what makes teenage girls tick.
Final point: in fairness one should note that there are a lot of popular and widely selling 'verse novels' for the YA market, although when I have looked inside these the versification didn't seem (at least to my jaundiced eye) to consist of much more than funky line-breaks.
Thanks so much Joseph! Yes Donaldson knows exactly what she's doing, she has a great ear. She makes it look easy but it isn't of course. I always find it odd that she is never mentioned in all those breast-beating "poetry never makes any money at all, even at the top" pieces because she has surely (and deservedly) made a very decent income and I don't see how you could possibly claim that she isn't a poet.
I agree with so much of this and I think what you say about the kind of verse that children find appealing is very much true of girls too, if they have the chance. It certainly was for me. I mean they might, as you say, be more receptive than the average boy (or more conditioned to feel that they should be receptive) to all the tedious form-free emoting, but I think whether they are or not is really a separate issue from whether you can enjoy listening to a good reading of the best bits of Tennyson vel sim. The "Book of 1000 Poems" has lots of examples of just the sort of thing you mean -- stirring narrative verse which sounds wonderful, is fun to say and remember and might even -- dare I say it -- actually be useful in life too. One whole section is dedicated specifically to narrative verse. Several of the poems you mention being particularly moved by as a child I was too, and I had an illustrated book of narrative verse which furnished me with a few more examples.
I think you're spot on too about how the routine place of verse of this kind in education meant that it was reflected in children's literature which was still being read even after it ceased to be true of actual schools -- this was something I commented on in the post about Antonia Forest's "school stories" before Christmas, from which I learnt many poems. I can also still recite all the verse that's quoted in both Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" and Lawrence's "The Rainbow" (Ursula in the hayloft swooning over Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable . . . ), which I read at about the same time.
I'm one of many sisters but like you, I only have boys. One is still a toddler, and of the older two one has responded quite strongly to a range of poetry since he was small. The other is more literal and less artistically-inclined. Two poems that really caught the imagination of both of them, though, were Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" and Charles Causley's "Colonel Fazackerley". There really ought to be a modern edition of the best bits of Noyes.
Have to admit that I had no idea about the YA 'verse novel' trend! Must investigate.
YA "verse" novels are very much a thing, sorry to say, as is the free "verse" novel generally. A lot of new fiction that's not selling itself as verse is written in a similar way. I can't say I understand the appeal (apart from an easy life for the writer...).
Our older son is more biddable in this direction; our younger one (now 11) read the Highwayman at school a year or so ago, and there was a period when 'Bess the landlord's daughter' was appearing whatever the situation. Funnily, they have also both enjoyed some of the `so bad it's good' bits of McGonagall; I would be hard put to analyse what *precisely* about the metre and rhyme that elevates e.g. The Tay Bridge Disaster from conventionally bad rhyming poetry to high comedy, but it had them both in stitches.
Just to jump in belatedly to this very interesting discussion to say that Ben Lerner gives an illuminating little analysis of the technical comedy of The Tay Bridge Disaster in his book The Hatred of Poetry: as I recall, he dissects it as a clash of duple and triple meter...
Thanks Victoria, I love this subject - curious to see what people come up with! The Emma Press have done some themed anthologies in recent years which might be the right age (I'm in two, so should declare an interest): https://theemmapress.com/product-category/childrens/poetry-anthologies/
Otherwise, the thing that immediately springs to mind is comic/nonsense verse. But none of my examples are exactly recent. We had Dahl's Revolting Rhymes on tape, I still remember Allan Ahlerg's 'Please Mrs Butler' (just poems in that one), Tilda can recite Belloc, I used to read lots of Spike Milligan and plenty of people who don't read poetry can still recite The Jabberwocky....
I wonder if we asked teenagers, whether they would tell us their favorite poets are songwriters. For example, consider the first verse of this song about remembered childhood:
“Please picture me in the trees / I hit my peak at seven / Feet in the swing over the creek / I was too scared to jump in / But I, I was high in the sky / With Pennsylvania under me / Are there still beautiful things?”
Song lyrics almost always end rhyme, but here end rhyme is mostly absent; instead, it uses extensive internal rhyme and assonance; the ear hears all those long Es and Is almost as a continuous rhyme when sung.
That’s from “seven” by Taylor Swift.
Oh yes definitely, almost all the people who are really good at rhyme (in all its varieties) are writing songs not poems these days for obvious reasons. All the same, I do think that what makes for a great song lyric is ultimately a bit different from a poem. I don't know Swift's work at all (I know, I know, last person on earth etc) but I think this is a great example for your point, not because it's a good poem (I don't think it is, as a poem, I have no idea what it's like as a song), but because, rephrased as a conventional lyric, you could find a dozen poems on exactly this highly relatable nostalgia for a childhood experience in the "Book of a Thousand Poems". (My favourite is the swinging in Thomas Hood, 'I remember, I remember', https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44387/i-remember-i-remember ) So this is a great example of song lyrics aimed -- presumably -- mainly at teenagers or young adults supplying exactly the kind of satisfaction a lyric poem might have done in a previous generation.
Forgot to say thanks for commenting!
Right, the lyrics are always in service to the song, so they don’t necessarily work quite the same way as words on a page, but they generally use the techniques of traditional poetry, particularly rhyme, refrain, stretches of meter, etc.
It’s weird how rhyme is still so popular if we look around. For example, any show or movie involving adventure, pirates, witches, whatever — if there’s a riddle for solving the mystery or a clue to finding the treasure, it will always be rhymed. Always. Perhaps that’s just a screenwriter trope, but it shows how young people often live in a world that rhymes. It’s just adults who don’t.
Songwriters never became self-conscious about rhyme.
What a wonderful article. I studied Racine, but don’t know Fenelon. I will look for it… one of the first books read to me was “When Daisies Pied, and Violets Blue” songs from Shakespeare. The illustrations are so gorgeously beautiful
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. The songs from Shakespeare are so lovely aren't they, there are lots in the "Thousand Poem" anthology I wrote about here. Thanks for commenting.
This lovely post makes me wish I had written the critical essay I once proposed on Julia Donaldson's skill as a poet -- but probably lacked the time to write, due to the small children I was reading her to... It always amused me to notice that she had a 'hack' job writing Biff and Chip early reader books before she broke through with The Gruffalo etc. But even those required a discipline of clear narrative sentences with varied syllables. I think I also once suggested in a lecture that many of the tropes of the modern childhood poem could be found in the perfect verses of Peepo...
She's so good isn't she? And goodness, writing Biff and Chip must take discipline way beyond that of most so-called "formalist" poets, because it's a phonics reading scheme isn't it? (Vague memories of when my older ones were little.) So especially in the early books you've only got a very narrow list of phonemes you're actually allowed to use. Because of the timing of our move and my middle son's particular birth date, he sequentially did reception and Y1 in England and then "CP" (sort of like Y1, but also the first year of primary school as opposed to maternelle) in France. Fascinating contrast! Though to be fair French phonics are a lot more regular.