From the May/June 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

On Originality in Children’s Poetry

BY J. PATRICK LEWIS

ne of the most devastating ways to describe a poet’s work — for adults or for children — is to call it “derivative.” A poet who forgets Ezra Pound’s admonition to “make it new” seems destined for oblivion. Here is T. S. Eliot, on the derivative Shakespearean-era playwright Philip Massinger: “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

Exactly so. The old chestnut that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” suffers in its very essence. To paraphrase Verlaine, if you hear the word sincere, get up at once and leave the room. Stealing in Eliot’s sense, however, is no crime, at least not in the service of the poem. The poem is always more important than the poet, a point Eliot makes eloquently in his great essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

For the purposes of this article, let’s eliminate parody, the humorous twin of a serious, if sometimes gaseous, literary work. Parody is imitation-by-design; it wants you to know what’s being mocked. And much of it is abysmal, save for minor masterpieces like Lewis Carroll’s send-up of pious Isaac Watts’s poem beginning “How doth the little busy Bee.” Secondly, let’s separate form from substance and style. When you consider just how difficult it is to invent a new verse form — the latest one, the double dactyl, appeared almost forty years ago (hats off to Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal) — you realize what Pound could not have meant. “Making it new” quite obviously did not mean that the limerick, sonnet, haiku, et al., once born, should never be used again.

Some otherwise well-intentioned newcomers take the desire for originality to extremes. Not long ago, a young woman told me that she wanted more than anything else to write and publish children’s poetry. By way of encouragement, or so I thought, I asked her which poets she liked to read. “Oh my,” she said, “I never read poetry. I wouldn’t want to be influenced by what others have written.”

Failing to conceal my astonishment, and quite apart from proclaiming the sheer joy of luxuriating in great poetry, I wondered whether in learning, say, to paint or to play the piano, a beginner would not automatically consider the compositions that classic artists and composers had produced. And isn’t it possible that reading other poets just might be the catalyst for her own magnum opus? The incident called to mind Samuel Johnson’s two centuries–old advice, which goes something like: Never trust anyone who writes more than he reads.

Conversely, a legion of eager, would-be children’s poets have warmed to the mistaken belief that the road to publication is paved with gold if only they can cobble together work that reads “just like Dr. Seuss.” There was one Dr. Seuss, a true pioneer of American children’s verse, and that’s all the world needs, unless, of course, one can follow Eliot’s advice and “make it something better, or at least something different.” In which case, if it is different, then it is also no longer Seussian. Salvador Dalí once said that the first person to compare the cheeks of a girl to a rose was obviously a poet; the second person to do it was possibly an idiot.

Likewise, Myra Cohn Livingston and Valerie Worth, two lyric minimalists, found their own inimitable voices. But their poetry has unintentionally spawned a phalanx of poetasters whose self-consciously mimetic verse often seems written on limp dishrags.

Consider how instructive “borrowing” can be when it’s done well. Much admired and properly prized is Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. In a fanciful stanza from “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” she writes:

It is difficult to imagine that Willard could have penned this verse without a bow to Blake’s wholly original work. But she also borrowed the rhythms of the woefully underappreciated British poet, Charles Causley, in his “The Forest of Tangle.”

X. J. Kennedy has acknowledged his debt to and admiration for the whimsical “Little Willies” rhymes created by Harry Graham in his Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1899). Arguably the most ingenious punster we have, Kennedy then went on to outdo Graham’s strict nonsense by making it his own.
Memorable to several generations of young and older readers is the poem, sprung from the mischievous mind of Shel Silverstein, that begins:

Recalcitrant Sarah’s misadventure originated in the voices of long-forgotten eighteenth-century wits such as Peter Pindar and Thomas Moore, as Silverstein would have readily admitted. Does it matter? Not at all. Silverstein’s Sarah is far funnier than her predecessors.

If you read contemporary children’s poetry with some knowledge of the grand tradition from which it flows, only tone deafness can keep you from hearing echoes of the past: the lambent lines of worthies like Christina Rossetti, Langston Hughes, and Robert Louis Stevenson in gentle poems, or the inspired wordplay of David McCord and John Ciardi in nonsense verse. Even Anonymous, that most mysterious of Muses, has lent the melody of her songs to untold scribblers of verse.

The lesson here for children’s poets is simply this: imitate only for poetic finger exercises, not for publication. But always a borrower be. My own benefactors range from Eliot himself, Auden, Housman, Lear, Carroll, the Carryls — Charles and Guy, père and fils — to many other lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century toilers in poetry, nonsense, and light verse. I happily confess my felonies. When poets stand on the shoulders of their forebears, they should do so with a lightness, not to say airiness, that bespeaks respect for the tradition and an unimpeachable commitment to originality.

Children’s poet J. Patrick Lewis’s 2005 books of poetry include Please Bury Me in the Library (Harcourt); Monumental Verses (National Geographic); Vherses: A Celebration of Outstanding Women; and Galileo’s Universe (both Creative Editions).