Michael Rosen and Contemporary British Poetry for Children

Abstract

Michael Rosen and Contemporary British Poetry for Children * Michael Lockwood (bio) The publication of Michael Rosen’s first poetry collection Mind Your Own Business in 1974 is often seen as marking the beginning of a new phase in British poetry for children. It “heralded the new ‘streetwise’ school of poetry” to which the critic and author John Rowe Townsend gave a label that has stuck: “urchin verse” (Styles, “Every Child” 123). It was a peculiarly British phenomenon; “hardly known in America,” for example (Styles, “Poetry for Children” 204). Townsend characterized the development initiated by Rosen as a movement “from the garden to the street” in terms of subject matter (“instead of woods and meadows . . . disused railway lines, building sites and junkheaps”) and “from the ‘poetic’ to the demotic” in terms of language: a general tendency “to cock the snook at social and literary pretension” (292, 300). This view of Rosen’s influence as a disruptive one has been persistent; Neil Philip, introducing his New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1996), comments: In Britain, there has been a seismic shift in children’s poetry. The line running from Stevenson and Rossetti, through de la Mare, Farjeon, and Reeves, to Charles Causley has been disrupted by a more boisterous, less reflective street-smart poetry. . . . The focus is on shared not unique experience, on the rhythms of speech not the patterns of prosody, on school not home. (xxxxii–xxxiii) Rosen saw his achievement in rather less dramatic terms: At that actual moment, there was very little poetry for children that was truly autobiographical, as well as humorous and written from a child’s point of view. . . . Not that I am suggesting some explosion took place when that book [Mind Your Own Business] or the next few came out. In that tiny world of children’s poetry there was a bit of a ripple. And if ripples ruffle feathers, [End Page 57] that’s what happened, and over the years both the ripples and ruffles have got bigger. (Did I Hear 8) Almost twenty-five years on, it is possible to view Rosen’s achievement with a greater sense of perspective. Rereading Rosen’s first two collections (his second being Wouldn’t You Like To Know [1977]), the childhood he is describing, usually his own in the 1950s and early 1960s, begins to seem more remote from the experience of contemporary children, for whom the street, as well as woods and meadows, has ceased to be an arena for unsupervised play. Rosen’s early poems also recreate, beneath the minor irritations of daily life, the warmth and security of a two-parent family, another experience unfamiliar to many contemporary children. The boyish adventures described in some of the poems, such as “wading down the River Pinn” (Mind Your Own 18–19), take place in a city landscape that is ultimately benign and safe despite the imaginary perils described (“you have to watch for hidden jaws in the mud/or beaver dams and Amazon settlements”). Quentin Blake, the illustrator of all Rosen’s early collections, depicts in the line drawing accompanying this poem a similar urban environment where boys climb happily on an elderly abandoned car and on a tree growing next to it. The “demotic” of Rosen’s poems also seems less of a “cocking of the snook” than it did to early reviewers: “Keep your hair on mate:/ Mind Your Own Business,” to quote the opening poem of the first collection, would strike most contemporary British readers as a fairly mild piece of impertinence. With the passage of time and the changing experience of childhood, then, Rosen’s early work is more easily seen historically. Rather than reducing the importance of his work, however, this has the effect of revealing the continuities between Rosen’s poetry and the tradition of British children’s poetry, without diminishing the originality of Rosen’s achievement in its time. Rosen himself now stresses the links he feels as a poet with his predecessors, partly as a defense against the charges still made against him, and his fellow “urchin versifiers,” that they broke with a line that was more genuinely “poetic” in the sense of using traditional...