Chapter 19 - Disciplined Play

Summary

Children's poetry is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in colleges of education. American children's poetry, like American literature more generally, took on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and published by Americans. The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the child like qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent, it is really an adult voice making an adult point. The few poems that Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime appeared mostly in intergenerational venues, like the Springfield Republican, that routinely published poems for a child/adult mixed readership. After the Civil War, children's poetry became relatively less concerned with useful lessons and more concerned with sales.