British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme by Donelle Ruwe (review)

The significance for the history of children’s poetry of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715) and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) has long been appreciated. To identify these volumes as seminal works of children’s poetry presents certain problems, however. For all Watts’s prescience in identifying a role for poetry in enriching the mental life of the child, and considering that he inaugurated forms, subjects, and modes of address that shaped how subsequent generations of children’s poets conceived of the possibilities inherent in children’s poetry, scholars seeking to plot secular histories of children’s literature are uncertain about how to negotiate the overtly proselytizing directions of Watts’s verse, since they sit so uncomfortably with modern notions of literature as bound up with freedom and readerly pleasure. By contrast, Blake’s Songs of Innocence is notable precisely because it rejects the overt didacticism of the Watts volume to which it implicitly responds; however, to view these poems as children’s poems introduces its own complications. Despite the radical and far-reaching ways in which Blake’s Songs fostered a new valorization of childhood innocence, and despite its experimental format which nurtures a shared reading experience between adults and children, it is not altogether clear to what extent these poems, if at all, are accessible to or relevant for a child reader. As has routinely been observed, the obstacles that prevent us from straightforwardly treating work by Watts and Blake as children’s poems largely fall away when we encounter children’s poetry produced during the second half of the nineteenth century by familiar figures such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Robert Louis Stevenson, wherein we can more obviously recognize the affinities between the plays of poetry and child’s play. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that for scholars interested in children’s poetry, the late nineteenth century and beyond has proven to be so much more inviting than the centuries preceding it. As a result, positivist histories of children’s literature such as John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children: An Outline of English Children’s Literature (1965) and Geoffrey Summerfield’s Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1984), which continue to cast a shadow over the ways in which the history of children’s literature is told, have tended to construe children’s poetry written prior to the 1860s as a tedious, if curious, prelude to the arrival of children’s literature proper. But our de facto weddedness to this narrative, for all the glaring presentism that it entails, reinforces a series of critical priorities among children’s literature scholars: the prioritization of prose over poetry, the prioritization of material produced since the 1860s over material produced before it, and the prioritization of delight over instruction. As a result of decades’ worth of children’s literature scholarship that has pursued these priorities, we have neglected to hone apposite critical strategies to enable us fruitfully to handle the kind of material that has so frequently fallen beneath our critical notice as we hastily move our gaze toward late nineteenth-century prose that courts the child’s amusement.

Donelle Ruwe’s important book, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (2014), provides us with a series of maneuvers for thinking our way through and beyond the problems which so often confront us when we attempt to settle our gaze more directly on understudied material of this kind, and need to make choices about the modes of viewing that we will adopt as we look at them. Her focus is on children’s poetry written during the decades between William Blake and Lewis Carroll—the Romantic period—by authors whose names have largely fallen out of the literary landscape. Among the authors she examines are poets who instantiated verse practices which have molded the literary sensibilities of young readers well beyond their own...