The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children

The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children - Parts 1 and 2

IN compiling a selection of Poetry for Children, a conscientious Editor is bound to find himself confronted with limitations so numerous as to be almost disheartening. For he has to remember that his task is, not to provide simple examples of the whole range of English poetry, but to set up a wicket-gate giving attractive admission to that wide domain, with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walled and scented gardens here and there, and so to its sunlit, and sometimes misty, mountain-topsall to be more fully explored later by those who are tempted on by the first glimpse. And always he must be proclaiming to the small tourists that there is joy, light and fresh air in that delectable country. v Briefly, I think that blank verse generally, and the drama as a whole, may very well be left for readers of a riper age. Indeed, I believe that those who can ignore the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow-Elizabethans till they are sixteen will be no losers in the long run. The bulk, too, of seventeenth and eighteenth century poetry, bending under its burden of classical form and crowded classical allusion, requires a completed education and a wide range of reading for its proper appreciation. Much else also is barred. There are the questions of subject, of archaic language and thought, and of occasional expression, which will occur to everyone. Then there is dialect, and here one has to remember that these poems are intended for use at the very time that a child is painfully acquiring a normaloften quite arbitraryorthography. Is it fair to that child to hammer into himperhaps literallythat porridge is spelt porridge, and next minute to present it to him, in an official Reader, under the guise of parritch? I think not; and I have accordingly kept as far as possible to the normal, though at some loss of material. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 50994
Author: Grahame, Kenneth
Release Date: Jan 22, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Grahame, Kenneth, 1859-1932