Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (review)

For years I have taught a class called Literacy Through Poetry, Verse and Wordplay in a graduate education program. The course, among other topics, introduces poets classic and contemporary, critically and historically considers poetry along its entire spectrum from doggerel to distinguished, and addresses the viewpoint of certain critics that poetry written especially for children is not poetry at all. After reading Poetry's Playground with the avid interest and absorption readers usually reserve for their favorite escapist reading material, I am eager to add this title to the reading list for the course and to enrich the syllabus through the incorporation of new insights gleaned from this meticulously researched work.

"This book was originally conceived as a critical history of children's poetry written and published in the United States after the mid-1950s" (xiii). The author decided to limit the scope of the project, describing the gap in critical and historical scholarship on the subject as "too large to be filled by one book" (xviii). Forced to be selective, Thomas addresses with insight the key issues concerning this poetry, including one that infects what critical study exists in the field of children's poetry: the academic attitude toward poetry addressed specifically to children. Typically, academics have disparaged this genre, suggesting that its presentation robs the young of a true poetic experience. "When it comes to poetry criticism, stark lines are drawn between the child world and its adult counterpart. This study seeks to dissolve those borders" (xviii). Dissolving borders based upon sternly held opinions is far from easy, but I believe that if it is at all possible to open minds through historically based, well-reasoned argument, Poetry's Playground has the means to accomplish this daunting task.

"Canonical issues frame this book," acknowledges the author (xv). He argues that there are two dominant modes of children's poetry: official school poetry as exemplified by the works of such icons as Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and, at the other end of the spectrum, works of, say, Jack Prelutsky, John Ciardi, and Shel Silverstein, verse whose antecedents are traditional nursery fare and playground lore. The book consists of five chapters, each a finely honed essay containing cogent argument based on wide-ranging research.

Chapter 1, "Public Poetry and Politics: Robert Frost and the Emerging Canon of Mid-Century American Children's Poetry," is a discussion in terms of the politics of inclusion and exclusion in anthologies. Thomas traces Robert Frost's emergence as the official "school poet" of his own time and his endurance in that role in anthologies for schools.

Chapter 2, "Levels and Opposites" in Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet, contains an insightful view of the poetics of Randall Jarrell, another "school poet" but one who also wrote poems intended specifically for children. (It is interesting to note that one of these, not submitted as a children's poem, was published in the New Yorker, traditionally the venue for what is considered the best of poetry or at least what is recognized as cutting edge in the genre.) The ambivalence and contradictions involved in discussions even among poets of the relative merits of poetry are exemplified in Jarrell's two-sided poetic. On the one hand, he revered the traditionalism of Frost while, on the other, he appreciated and practiced himself aspects of the nontraditional. The diligent research that informs these chapters provides fresh and intriguing ideas to enrich the old and continuing argument about what Poetry with a capital P is and is not.

Chapter 3, "Child Poets and the Poetry of the Playground," contains substantive information to supplement the well-known work of the Opies. Here readers who have not made a personal study of children's poetry may meet for the first time scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., who discusses in his book, The Signifying Monkey, aspects of street poetry the Opies do not, such as racism and male pride. Aligning himself...