Poetry and Childhood (review)

During my first semester of graduate school at Illinois State University, I was enrolled in a seminar on the subject of literary theory and children's literature led by Jan Susina, who, at the time, was this publication's book review editor. One evening, Jan brought into class copies of a then new and now infamous book review by Peter Hunt. The monograph Peter engaged, Jill May's Children's Literature and Critical Theory, was on our syllabus, but Jan's aim in exposing us to the review was not, I surmise, simply to deepen our understanding of May's book. Rather, it demonstrated how small our field could seem and how difficult, therefore, it is to write critically of work produced by friends and acquaintances. Hunt's review, profoundly negative, begins by foregrounding this difficulty:

Reviewing books on children's literature requires perhaps more professionalism from both reviewer and reviewee than in many other disciplines: it's a small world. . . . Most of us know each other, and we can respect each other's opinions, even if we don't much like those opinions, without it becoming a matter of personalities.

(387)

Additionally, the review suggests the insecurity we often feel as members of a sometimes disparaged, marginalized, and misunderstood field. As youth-obsessed as the West can be, readers of this journal will doubtlessly need little convincing that adults can have reductive and condescending views about children and their culture—including their literature—an insecurity that leads Hunt to write,

many of us involved in teaching children's literature have for years been struggling to establish its credibility as a subject, in the face of skepticism from other academics. We are not, of course, alone in this, but the U.K. has perhaps one fiftieth of the number of academics that North America has and so there is little room to maneuver, few places to hide.

(387)

At the end there, I'm reminded of Randall Jarrell's poem "The Bird of Night." Jarrell's shadowy owl recalls Hunt's "other academics," while the poor children's literature scholar with "few places to hide" suggests the owl's tiny prey:

The ear that listens to the owl believesIn death. The bat beneath the eaves,

The mouse beside the stone are still as death—The owl's air washes them like water.The owl goes back and forth inside the night,And the night holds its breath.

(The Lost World 65)

We feel small, vulnerable, even after years of struggle, and the resultant insecurity can lead us to forget that although we are scholars, we are also human, and just as we are human, so are our colleagues. Children's literature may be marginalized by scholars outside our discipline, but the study of children's poetry is marginalized by scholars within our discipline. Therefore, those of us—like myself—who attend to children's poetry regularly can feel even more insecure, more worried about its place within the academy, more prone to overreact when it is dismissed or treated without the rigor and sensitivity we feel it deserves. These worries and this tendency to overreact can, unfortunately, cause us to forget lessons like those Jan endeavored to teach his students that cold fall evening in central Illinois: be compassionate in your criticism. Be human.

This preamble brings me to the subject of my review: Poetry and Childhood, a collection of twenty-six short essays edited by Morag Styles, Louise Joy, and David Whitley. Many of the contributors will be familiar, some less so. Several are close friends of mine, and many are acquaintances. All are fine writers, and a handful are poets (including Angela Sorby, whom the introduction forgets in its list of poet contributors). However, one doesn't have to be too clever a reader to recognize that any review beginning with such a preamble is going to be mixed. Still, there is much to recommend. The topics covered in Poetry and Childhood are wide-ranging, as are the...