When Did Poetry Speak to Us? When We Were Very Young

Poetry, as everyone knows, is unpopular. So unpopular, in fact, that critics writing about it for a general audience often choose to acknowledge that state of affairs up front, as I’ve just done, on the ground that it’s easier to be persuasive if you appear to inhabit existing reality, as opposed to behaving as if most people are only an encouraging sentence away from diving into “The Tennis Court Oath.”

But it wasn’t always this way. The most remarkable thing about poetry’s unpopularity isn’t that it exists, but that it exists in the wake of a period in which poems were not merely popular, but embraced with a fierce and unembarrassed joy. That period, of course, is childhood. For children, the questions often asked about poetry’s status are so beside the point as to seem almost absurd. Can poetry matter? Obviously, say more than 850,000 copies of “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,” among many, many other rhyming best sellers. Can poetry be widely recited and remembered? Indubitably, say half a million nightly tours of a great green room containing mittens, kittens, a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who is whispering “hush.” Can a poem be overtly instructive while still being worthwhile as poetry? Well, “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” says a determined elephant named Horton. If adult poetry sometimes seems to exist in the shadow of fiction and music, children’s poetry more than holds its place in the sun.

This is in some respects unsurprising. Numerous psychological studies have pointed to the significance of music to an infant’s development of language; indeed, “the further removed a feature of language is from music, the later it is learned,” according to a paper in Frontiers in Psychology by Anthony Brandt, Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc. This would seem to put poetry, the most musical of the language-based arts, in the catbird’s seat. In one of the very few book-length studies of children’s poetry, the British academic Debbie Pullinger argues that poetry “plays a vital integrating role for children,” because it can “return the child to the place where language and the body are felt not as irreconcilable facets of experience but as fundamentally interconnected.” A child experiences a poem not primarily as words a person is using, but as sounds a voice is making.

In practice, this means children’s poetry foregrounds the art form’s acoustical elements: rhyme, rhythm, stress. It also means that children’s poetry is unusually, for lack of a better word, fun — or at least, that it unapologetically sets out to be entertaining. Consider RUNNY BABBIT RETURNS (Harper/HarperCollins, $19.99), by Shel Silverstein, a new sequel of sorts to “Runny Babbit,” which was posthumously issued in 2005 (Silverstein died in 1999). If you’re one of the millions raised on “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and “A Light in the Attic,” you know the basic Silverstein approach: humor (often deliberately childish, gross-out humor), rhyme, wordplay and occasional regular versification with heavy doses of doggerel. In “Runny Babbit Returns,” we follow a young rabbit prone to spoonerisms. “Runny’s Irty Dears” is representative:

Runny tumbled in the grass
Until his grears were een.
He clook them to the teaners
To get them nice and clean.
The cleaner said,
“They won’t be ready
Till next Saturday.”
Runny said, “I’m sorry,
I can’t sear a word you hay.”

Spoonerisms are amusing because they sound funny, but also because they can overlay two meanings if the transposition creates actual words (that is, what we actually read collides with what we feel should be on the page). Here, Silverstein smartly leads with the first quality (“grears” and “een” is especially good) and delivers the latter in his final line for additional punch as “hear,” “sear,” “hay” and “say” intriguingly commingle. Granted, to an adult reader, a few poems like this may go a long way. Yet it isn’t hard to see the connection between the appeal of this work to a child and the aural attraction a poet like Wallace Stevens holds for older audiences (“This will make widows wince. But fictive things / Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince”). As we age, our tastes change — but we still need to eat.