Children and poetry

Abstract

A recent monograph concluded that poetry is much more difficult for children than prose, and suggests that the amount usually offered them be cut down. Another valuable study found that the evidence is all against poetry as an interest factor in primary literature, causing the writer to conclude that fifty per cent of the items in the primary readers is too much to give to poetry. Another recent article in a pedagogical magazine shows a twenty-six per cent greater supply of poetry for children than is demanded. The Report on the Teaching of English in England makes an assertion that probably not more than ten per cent of adults ever read poetry; and a contemporary essay on the study of poetry, in trying to explain why adults do not read it, assigns two reasons: one, that they have never been deeply touched by it; the other, that they feel that poetry is impractical and effeminate. Another investigation into the nature of reading done by adults found their reading was at a very low level, poetry rarely being a part of it. This evidence is gloomy for those who are lovers of poetry. To many of us it indicates an absence of ethical and idealistic impulses in American life; for, as George Santayana says, religion is only poetry put into practice in our daily lives. What ground have we lost since the high-souled Emerson wrote of the Infinite source of all life! Shall we relegate poetry to the corner in the home and school just because adults do not read, or because children themselves find it uninteresting as reading matter? What shall we do, since all maintain that the purpose of poetry is to make life richer and fuller? This lack of poetry may be appropriately coincident with the ugliness in American life today. Our Babbitts need more of it in their Rotary Clubs and offices, and even in their religion. First, let us go back to the library and ask why poetry is not called for by the children. It is natural for children to delight in poetry; their lives are full of it. A little girl, aged four, came into the break-