“Mary’s Lamb” by Sarah Josepha Hale published in 1830.

Part 1: Overview

I hope nobody skips this podclass. It’s probably the most important class of the series and some of the most important American ideas we’ll read.

That said, this is the longest podclass we will have. For one thing, the lectures cover 400 years of poems. Secondly, these poems are the foundation for the rest of it. So hang in there. Take it slow.

If you haven’t completed the Intro podclass where we survey the major themes in American poetry, you might be confused in this class as I’ll be mentioning many of these terms through this lectures. So feel free to go back and catch up with that class if you haven’t already.

Regarding children’s poetry, many poets (and critics and scholars) believe they’ve outgrown it. Readers become hardened to children’s verses, maybe even annoyed by them. We like to think we’ve have outgrown such things.

But there was a time in our lives when adult things sounded annoying and very boring to us.

Revisiting children’s poetry is probably the only way we can get back to our beginner’s mind with poetry. Plus the fact that this was probably the most important poetry we ever encountered in our whole lives the poetry that had the biggest impact on our imaginations. And we probably don’t even remember.

Now this is assuming we had access to these books. Not everyone was so lucky. Maybe your parents or grandparents didn’t read to you or buy books for you. Maybe you never found these stories in your school or public library.

But if you didn’t have access to these books and authors, you can always read them now and see what they can do for you.

The important thing is to approach this poetry not with our adult minds, not as parents considering books for our children or students, but with our own inner child’s mind. Before things (like our egos) went off the rails.

If you had a hard childhood, you may need to take a minute to find some self-protection before launching back into that child-mind-space. Children’s poetry was usually meant to be a qualified safe space (depending on the period it was written…and we’ll get to that) and everyone thinks children’s poetry is very innocuous but it’s actually quite potent.

If you need a text overview of any audio lecture, please email mary@bigbangpoetry.com.

 

Part 2:  Content

2.1 Introduction

Audio Lecture: Intro to Children’s Poetry (18:43 minutes)

Periods Covered:

  1. British Colonial Period through Post Colonial Period (1687 to mid-1800s)
    • New England schoolhouse
    • The “sentimental women” poets
  2. Nation Building Era or Antebellum Period (Early 1800s to American Civil War)
    • Fireside poets
    • 1800s schoolhouse poetry
  3. Post Civil-War or The Guilded Age (late 1800s)
    • Dawn of the child as a demo
  4. The Turn of the Century (1899 to 1911)
    • Dialect poems
    • More “sentimental women”
    • Playground poetry
  5. The Modernists (1913 to 1950s)
    • 1900s schoolhouse poetry
    • Modernism for kids
  6. Mid-Century Poets (1950s)
  7.  Post-Modernism Era (1960s to 1980s)
    • Gorey, Sendak, Silverstein
  8. Millennial (1980s to 2000s)
  9. Dr. Seuss (1955 to 1990)

American Themes:

  • The American Identity
    • Holidays
    • Who are the identity makers?
  • Sites of Conflict
    • Community versus individualism
    • Idealism versus pragmatism
    • What Christmas means
  • Cult of the Self
    • The American Dream
  • Experimentation and Discovery
    • Imagination
    • Ingenuity
  • Technology
    • Is it the best or the worst?
  • Challenges to Authority
    • Disobedience
  • Work Ethic
  • Multicultural tangled threads
  • Sensationalism
  • The Open Road
    • American idylls
    • Early trips
  • Innocence to Experience
  • We are a Fiction
    • Myth
    • Imagination
  • Protect the Past/Explore the Future
    • History poems

Reading List:

Randall Jarrell
Children Selecting Books In A Library (1941)

Richard Wilbur
A Barred Owl (2000)

 

2.2 British Colonial Period through Post-Colonial Period
(1687 to mid-1800s)

Audio Lecture: Colonial and Post-Colonial Children’s Poetry (35:11 minutes)

Reading List:

New England Primer (1687 and 1690)
https://wordfoundations.com/new-england-primer/
https://ccad.libguides.com/rarebooks/nep

Clement Clarke Moore
A Visit From St. Nicholas (1823)

Sarah Josepha Hale
Mary’s Lamb (1830)

Lydia Maria Child
The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day (1845)

Hannah Flagg Gould
The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy (1836)
In the audio lecture, I talk about not knowing how the Kentucky Mummy (also known as “Lost John”) was displayed publicly. Research shows it was discovered in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, in 1816 and then displayed in a Worcester, Massachusetts, museum from 1916 to 1876 and also in a Philadelphia World Exposition in 1876 and a Chicago World Exposition in 1893. The mummy was then given to the Smithsonian. The mummy was finally repatriated (or returned out of respect) in the 1970s, buried in an undisclosed location in the same cave where he was discovered.

 

2.3 Nation Building Era or Antebellum Period
(Early 1800s to American Civil War)

Audio Lecture: Fireside and Schoolroom Children’s Poetry (28:38 minutes)

Reading List:

William Bryant
Thanatopsis (1817)
lines to a Waterfowl (1818)

Sarah Roberts Boyle
The Voice of the Grass (1823)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Psalm of Life (1838)
The Village Blacksmith (1840)
Paul Revere’s Ride (1860)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Fable (1846)

John Greenleaf Whittier
Barefoot Boy (1855)

Walt Whitman
O Captain My Captain (1865)

 

2.4 Post Civil-War or The Guilded Age
(late 1800s)

Audio Lecture: Post Civil War Children’s Poetry (10 minutes)

Reading List:

Olive A. Wadsworth
Over the Meadow (1870)

Laura E. Richards
Harriet Hutch (1881)
(search for “Harriet”)

James Whitcomb Riley
Little Orphant Annie (1885)
The Bear Story (1897)

Eugene Field
The Duel (1894)

Gelett Burgess
The Purple Cow (1895)
The Goops (1900)

 

2.5 The Turn of the Century
(1899 to 1911)

Audio Lecture: Turn of the Century Children’s Poetry (14:29 minutes)

Reading List:

Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Little Brown Baby (1899)
The Seedling (1913)
In The Morning (1903)

Sara Teasdale
The Kind Moon (1911)
Wishes (1907)

Anonymous
Miss Suzy Had a Steamboat (early 1900s)
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack (1880 ish)

 

2.6 The Modernists
(1913 to 1950s)

Audio Lecture: Modernist Children’s Poetry (26:09 minutes)

Reading List:

Robert Frost
Reluctance (1913)
The Road Not Taken (1915)
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922)

Carl Sandburg
Early Moon (1918)
Wind Song (1960)
Fog (1916)
Arithmetic (1930)
Buffalo Dusk (1920)
Primer Lesson (1922)

e.e cummings
in Just- (1920)

Elizabeth Madox Roberts
The Woodpecker (1922)
Mumps (1922)

Langston Hughes
The Dream Keeper (1925)
Dreams (1922)
Dream Variation (1926)

Elizabeth Coatsworth
Swift Things Are Beautiful (1934)

William Carlos Williams
The Turtle (1956)
The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

Gertrude Stein
The World is Round (1939) (PDF)

Gwendolyn Brooks
Cynthia in the Snow (1956)
Rudolph is Tired of the City (1956)

 

2.7 Mid-Century Poets
(1950s)

Audio Lecture: Mid-Century Children’s Poetry (10:20 minutes)

Reading List:

Ogden Nash
The Tale of Custard The Dragon (1936)
The Adventures of Isabel (1930s)
The Cow (1931)
The Octopus (1941)

Theodore Roethke
The Bat (1938)
The Sloth (1958)

Sylvia Plath
The Bed Book (1959)

Walt Kelly
Deck Us All With Boston Charlie (1948)
The Prince of Pompadoodle (1962)
https://whirledofkelly.blogspot.com/2010/05/prince-of-pompadoodle.html (with illustrations)
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-prince-of-pompadoodle/

John Ciardi
The Reason for the Pelican (1959)

 

2.8  Post-Modernism Era
(1960s to 1980s)

Audio Lecture: Post-Modernism Era Children’s Poetry (16:04 minutes)

Reading List:

David McCord
Every Time I Climb a Tree (1967)

Edward Gorey
The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963)

Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months (1962) (PDF)

Shel Silverstein
Jimmy Jet and His TV Set (1974)
Sarah Synthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out (1974)
Sick (1974)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974)
Hug ‘O War (1974)

May Swenson
Analysis of Baseball (1978)

Donald Hall
Ox-Cart Man (1979)

 

2.9 Millennial
(1980s to 2000s)

Audio Lecture: Millennial Era Children’s Poetry (6:54 minutes)

Reading List:

Jack Prelutsky
Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face (1984)
Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens (1990)

Arnold Adoff
The Way I See Any Hope For Later

Elizabeth Alexander with students in the Hall Elementary School Many Rivers Program
They Have Freckles Everywhere (2007)

Twas the Night Before Christmas (iPad version, $0.99)

Dr. Seuss books (iPad versions, free)

 

2.10 Dr. Seuss
(1955 to 1990)

Audio Lecture: Dr. Seuss (30:45 minutes)

Reading List:

Most recommended titles have an asterisk.

And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) (PDF)*
McElliogot’s Pool (1947) (PDF with illustrations)
Thidwick The Big-Hearted Moose (1948) (with illustrations)
Scrambled Eggs Supper! (1953) (flipbook)
Horton Hears a Who (1954)*
Yertle The Turtle (1958)*
Sneetches (1961)*
The Zax (1954 and then 1961 with Sneetches)*
What Was I Scared Of (1961) (flipbook)
I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew (1965) (PDF)
I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today (1969) (PDF with illustrations)
The Lorax (1971) (PDF with illustrations)
The Butter Battle Book (1984) (with illustrations)*
O The Places You’ll Go (1990) (PDF with illustrations)*
The Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) (with illustrations)*

Jim Henson and The Muppets
The Rainbow Connection from The Muppet Movie (1979)

 

Part 3: Writing Exercises

You can do one, a few or all.

  1. Write an alphabet poem.
  2. Write a Dr. Seuss poem. Illustrate it if you can.
  3. Write a nonsense poem, purely by free association
  4. Write a poem that’s about something that really scared you as a kid. Be an an adult writer who can assist in some way. Give perspective or maybe some coping tools to let that kid feel safer. Or still scared, as you like.
  5. Write a city versus country poem from a child’s perspective.

Questions to Think About Before Next Class:

What makes an adult poem. Is it an adult voice? An adult POV? Complexity? Seriousness instead of playfulness?

Part 4: More Exploring

Treasure Hunts

  1. Lydia Sigourney “Birth-day Verses to a Little Girl” (1827)
  2. Sarah Piatt “Trumpet Flowers” (1883)
  3. John Ciardi You Read to Me, I’ll Read To You (1961)
  4. John Ciardi “The Man Who Sang the Sillies”
  5. Dr. Seuss On Beyond Zebra (1955)
  6. Dr. Seuss Gertrude McFuzz (1958)
  7. Dr. Seuss King Louis Katz (1969)
  8. Marjorie Maddox poems (2000s)
  9. Robin Hirsh Stupid, Ridiculous Poems for Intelligent Children (2002)
  10. Naomi Shihab Nye A Maze Me: Poems for Girls (2005)

Other Links:

Two books my parents kept on my bedroom dresser.

Extra Reading:

Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven (1845)

Celia Thaxter
The Sandpaper (1879)

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The Ostrich is a Silly Bird (1929 ish)

Joyce Kilmer
Trees (1913)

Robert Frost
Ghost House (1913)
October (1913)

T. S. Eliot (1939)
Old Posum’s Book of Practical Cats

Margaret Wise
Goodnight Moon (1947)

Theodore Roethke
Child on Top of a Greenhouse (1948)
(created with vocabulary restraints)

David McCord
This is my Rock (1952)

William Jay Smith
Butterfly (1957)

X.J. Kennedy
Little Elegy (for a child who skipped rope) (1960)

Randall Jarrell
Bats (1964)
The Owl’s Bedtime Story (1976)

Richard Wilbur
Digging for China (1956)
Some Opposites (1973 and 1991)
https://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/2008/09/poetry-friday-some-opposites.html

Ron Padgett
Chocolate Milk (1969)
Ladies and Gentlemen in Outer Space (1995)

Arnold Adoff
From This Bus Window
Let the Biter Beware

Dr. Seuss
Cat in the Hat (1957 with a constraint of a 348-word list for early readers) (PDF)

 

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