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Reviewed by:
  • The Poetics of Childhood
  • Leo Zanderer (bio)
Roni Natov . The Poetics of Childhood. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Not long ago I was engaged to play adjunct-Dad to my grandniece, a wide-eyed articulate child of four. One day she asked her Mom, "Where do words go?" This out-of-the-blue query is part and parcel of what Natov calls the poetics of childhood, rooted in innocence, expressive of the newness of things. Uninformed, it is thus magical, existential, phenomenological. Initiated by awe, it moves toward scientific inquiry and poetry. Natov wants to remind us of what childhood is like and how we must find ways to protect and support its modes of seeing and knowing, both in the lives of children and in our own lives.

Natov traces writing for and about children from Romanticism to the present, a chronicle of the embattled state of our critical early experience. She begins with the Romantics, especially Wordsworth and Blake, who were the first to focus on childhood as the place, space, terrain, and time in which the power of innocence, of an honest, felt, seeing and knowing occurs. Thus in her discussion of Wordsworth's "We Are Seven," she posits a nobility of the child in its intuitive belief in the self's necessary connection to its past and its community, and affirms his celebration of the life of a boy who died young, because the days of the child are transcendent, profound, effectively "trailing clouds of glory" (22-3).

In a complementary argument, Natov sees Blake as the genius of the visionary aspects of childhood. The Songs of Innocence and Experience, she argues, document the immediacy of experience in childhood but also indicate that such innocence must be tested by the harsh "experience" of the world. "The Chimney Sweeper" tells of the encounter between a child victimized by life, dirtied and sullied by work, imprisoned in an enbricked womb, whose simple yet self-aware account of his situation moves us to recognize the need for change (12). The blades of grass that are so wondrous to Blake are what childhood naturally knows and must be allowed to know. Only adults privy to childhood in its potential can live inspiriting, wise lives, close to the wonder of being.

"The Chimney Sweeper" suggests the absence of pastoral and its terrain, "the green world," absent because of the dubious progress of modernity, gridding our landscapes, enclosing or obliterating open spaces. Indeed, says Natov, the child herself often is the last vestige of pastoral. Thus we must be concerned about her situation, alert to her [End Page 102] voices. Opal Whiteley is such a voice, exclaiming in her strange affinities the need to belong through a sense of connection to the earth. While some argue that her Diary was the work of her mature years and not of her childhood, Natov rightly insists that in any case hers is a remarkable achievement. An orphan adopted by uncaring adults, Opal, who grew up in a logging camp in Oregon at the end of the nineteenth century, provides evidence of a remarkable mode of self-creation. "She sees with the feelings of the world, . . . 'Potatoes are very interesting folks. I thinks they must see a lot of what is going on in the earth; they have so many eyes. And after I did look those looks as I did go along, I did count the eyes that every potato did have, and their numbers were in blessings. . . . And all the times I was picking up potatoes I did have conversations with them. Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear. Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground . . .'" (40-1).

Much of The Poetics is given over to the forms of literature, children's and adult, that express life in a darker world. Natov describes the dark pastoral as depicting "the nightmare world of childhood . . . the other side of the green world," but its shadows are natural and "the power to ultimately survive and create is layered into both worlds" (119). Innocence...

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