A child’s enjoyment, as I said above, is what I have striven for in this collection. We who have seen how poetry has come to our rescue with its delight, its healing, and its new courage in times of stress and sorrow, know that it is an inestimable possession. We cannot come to the knowledge of it too early. If we can have a clear personal realization while we are children, that we love poetry, no amount of well-meaning but sometimes tactless and uninspired teaching of it in schools and colleges can shake us in the knowledge of that love. I remember that the first poem I was condemned to learn by heart in school was “The Builders” by Longfellow. I say condemned, but it was not as a punishment. Every child in the class had to learn it. It is one of the poems that I am sure the poet himself would never have given to a child to learn, beginning, as grown-up readers will remember:
“All are Architects of Fate
Working in these walls of Time.”
After committing the nine stanzas of this poem to memory, it took me a long time to grow willing to read the stirring things that the same poet has written, poems as interesting as this one is humdrum.
But education is better managed now than then. Teachers and parents alike have come to feel that the love of poetry in general is more to be desired for children than the knowledge of certain “well known” poems, no matter how good, or even how great, these poems may be. Besides a more tactfully managed education in the schools, there are children’s rooms in the public libraries. I have wished many times during the months spent in making this book, when visits to these rooms were an inspiration, that I might have browsed among the low shelves long ago in childhood, and talked with the same delightful librarians. I should like to express my thanks to these librarians, who have been so kind in various ways. I want especially to thank Annie Carroll Moore, Supervisor of Work with Children in the New York Public Library, who knows the heart of a child from long travelling on “The Roads to Childhood.”
In closing I shall quote briefly from the introduction by Andrew Lang to his anthology for children, “The Blue Poetry Book,” for he speaks my own thoughts better than I can express them: “It does not appear to the Editor that poems about children, or especially intended for children, are those which a child likes best. A child’s imaginative life is spent in the unknown future, and in the romantic past.... The poems written for and about children rather appeal to the old, whose own childhood is now to them a distant fairy world, as the man’s life is to the child.... We make a mistake when we ‘write down’ to children; still more do we err when we tell a child not to read this or that because he cannot understand it. He understands far more than we give him credit for, but nothing that can harm him. The half-understanding of it, too, the sense of a margin beyond, as in a wood full of unknown glades and birds and flowers unfamiliar, is a great part of a child’s pleasure in reading.... The child does not want everything to be explained. In the unexplained is great pleasure.”
A number of my friends have been kind in giving me the names of poems that they liked best when they were children. The small compass of the book has made it impossible to use all of the poems suggested in this way, but it has been a pleasure to include as many of them as I could. I want to acknowledge very gratefully my indebtedness for counsel and suggestions to John Gould Fletcher, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Louis Untermeyer, Jean Untermeyer, John Hall Wheelock and Marguerite Wilkinson.
Sara Teasdale
New York City, 1922
