The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry ― A Study of Children's Verse in English

Taking Isaac Wattsa€?s Divine Songs (1715) as its point of departure, this collection gives sustained attention to the literary, aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of seminal works of childrena€?s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While attending to central figures of childrena€?s poetry such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reassert the literary significance of landmark a€“ though often marginalized a€“ poetic works written during the past three centuries. In spite of the enduring association between poetry as a genre and childhood as a developmental stage, childrena€?s poetry has tended to be considered in terms of publication and literary history rather than aesthetics. And yet, ita€?s the aesthetics of the genre that inform this literary history, whether ita€?s Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of a€?like sounds,a€ William Blake and the Taylor sisters reveling in the semantic ambiguities made possible by poetic language, or the authors of nonsense verse testing the limits of languagea€?s capacity to convey any meaning at all. Alive to the way recent educational debates echo those waged during earlier centuries, The Aesthetics of Childrena€?s Poetry investigates the stylistic and ideological means through which childrena€?s poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates or fails to negotiate the competing positions that are constantly in play.

Katherine Wakely-Mulroney is a PhD candidate at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Louise Joy is a Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK.