Roethke, Wilbur, and the Vision of the Child: Romantic and Augustan in Modern Verse

One of the oldest tenets of our literary tradition is that poetry ought to delight and instruct. From Horace to Matthew Arnold, implicity or explicity, the thread runs: art serves some function—moral, didactic, religious—and employs aesthetically pleasing devices of language and form so that the message is headed and understood. Harry Bailly, for instance, asks of the Canterbury Pilgrims tales with "sentence" and "solaas," tales that instruct and please.

Rhyme and rhythm, particularly, have stood as exemplary methods for decorating ideas, making them more delightful. In Mother Goose, for instance, regularity of meter and rhyme made delightful the issues of the day.¹ So successful, in fact, was this technique, that today we remember the rhymes long after their substantive references have been lost. All that remains is the nonsense sense in which Jack Sprat ate no fat, or Old King Cole was a merry old soul. Today, the rhymes delight without instructing, give "solaas" without "sentence." In the history of Mother Goose, therefore, we perhaps see one of the earliest transformations of representational literature into art for art's sake.

In many ways, this now thoroughly fanciful art sets the formal standard for children's poetry, provides the definitive metric formulas. Devoid of their original referents, nursery rhymes also set the level of meaninglessness, of fantasy: Humpty Dumpties sitting on walls and old women living in shoes.

When a modern poet thinks of writing children's poetry, I believe, he has those formal criteria in the back of his head as firmly as any classical conceptions he may have about poetry in general. But he is also writing out of another, more recent tradition that in many ways is antithetical to the classical prescriptions: the idea that modern poetry should be difficult. Walt Whitman argued that poetry should be made difficult so that the American people would have to educate themselves to understand it. Whitman's call for difficult poetry was a project for the bettering of the democratic citizen. Whether this project—worthy of one of Swift's most outrageous projectors—was serious, ironic or a rationalization for the (then) difficult poetry that Whitman wrote, is impossible to determine. But, whatever its impetus, the idea has dominated American poetry for at least three quarters of a century.²

The contemporary American poet, therefore, writes out of two traditions: the 2000-year-plus tradition of western poetry, which holds that good poetry makes attractive garments out of moral fiber, i.e., simplifies the complex, and the modern tradition, which holds that good poetry gives us the rough threads of our existence, i.e., manifests the complex. As a result, the regularizing devices of rhyme and meter, the sing-song qualities which make poetry easy to recite, are virtually impossible to use seriously today. They are relegated to the realm of light verse: humor, sentimental greeting cards and popular songs. Serious poetry can employ rhyme and meter and often does, even in conjunction, but the use must be subtle, ironic, or in some way grate against the content so that the resulting matrix is difficulty. It is, in short, hard to take seriously verse in which we hear direct statement in a sustained, predictable, rhymed, metric pattern.

These formal elements, however, survive in poetry for children, and in writing children's verse, many of our serious poets manifest elements of composition originating in Classical traditions from which, in their adult poetry, they have consciously distanced themselves. Although the formal elements of children's verse, furthermore, have a Classical origin, the concept of writing poetry for children is essentially Romantic. The child is rarely mentioned as an audience or subject in the Restoration and Augustan Age. The desire to instruct and delight the child, to describe and sentimentalize childhood, has its foundation in the Romantic conception that the child is qualitatively different from the adult, and different in ways that do not reflect adversely on the child. In looking, therefore, at the way that modern American poets envision the child, use children's verse in their...