mall virtues are
rarely more than therapeutic, and direct myself only to that
specialized but most important category--poems written by a skilled
and adult poet but addressed to an audience of children who are likely
to be read to until they are skillful enough to read the same verses
for themselves.
The dangers for the poet in addressing so composite an audience are
enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the
most obvious ones. Some great writers of children's verse--Lewis
Carroll and Edward Lear--have successfully hedged themselves against
these dangers by insistent comedy and parody (Carroll's "serious"
children's verse is maudlin and embarrassing). By this means they have
contrived what the child will take as lovely, unintimidating,
mysterious, rational nonsense, and what the adult will recognize as a
travesty or burlesque of something very edgy indeed. Thus, Lear's "The
Dong with the Luminous Nose" and Carroll's "Jabberwocky" are,
respectively, bright and disguised versions of gothic terror and
misery on the one hand, and medieval knightly exploit on the other,
both rendered innocuous for the nursery and ridiculous for the adult.
The risks of seriousness have been successfully avoided.
The poetry of Walter de la Mare sings boldly and beautifully without
any of these hedges and condescensions. His work has the honest candor
of the border ballads and the fairy tales: as well as unmitigated
joys, they are full of the dangers and horrors and sorrows that every
child soon knows to be part of the world, however vainly parents try
to veil them. A child's curiosity about the forbidden will insist on
being satisfied; and better by verse than otherwise. This poetry is
also musically astute and demanding; it may surprise and alert the
parental reader; and it has its share of archaisms and poeticisms,
which, contrary to adult surmise, bemuse and fascinate children. And
it must be admitted that it is also relentlessly British; but then, so
is much good children's literature.
As a poet (he was also a gifted novelist and short-story writer) de la
Mare was praised by T. S. Eliot ("the delicate, invisible web you
wove") and by W. H. Auden ("there are no good poems which are only for
children"). His technical and linguistic skills are not, as Auden
rightly points out, a matter of indifference to children, who are in
the very business of learning language, as well as other facts of
life, and who are pa
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