I had stumbled upon some posts where a lot of tags were commenting on how others’ ability to understand and comprehend poetry. In a rather negative light, because others were equating simplifying poetry as to making them more accessible to the general public.
And it made me think about how I learned poetry as a child, and that is, very badly.
I don’t know how poetry is taught today, but from middle school to high school, poetry has always been a footnote in the English/Literature curriculum, and it was primarily about writing poetry, not reading poetry.
Which is really weird looking back on it.
Like we don’t expect a child to write a story without having read stories themselves. We encourage children to read stories and encourage parents to read stories to children as part of their growth and development. Unless you’ve been devoid of educational resources growing up, you would have heard a story. So it’s not a stretch that eventually you’d ask a child to write a story.
However, not every child has been read poetry, and it is a crime that as a child I was asked to write poetry in school, and never had been read poetry in school. The first time I had probably looked at a poem on an academic level was not until high school. The worst part about that, is that there wasn’t a lack of children’s poems.
Shel Silverstein wrote his first collection of children’s poems in 1974 Where the Sidewalk Ends, and was most well known for The Giving Tree, which was written 1964. Edward Lear is known for his limericks, wrote A Book of Nonsense in 1846, and is credited to why limericks are popular today. And if you’re talking about more traditional poetry, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a collection of children’s poems in 1885 called A Child’s Garden of Verses.
And these people do not even scratch the surface of what is out there. If you want to read more, look at Lit Hub’s list of 10 Wonderful Children’s Poets You Should Know.
Even in middle school we never touched that much on poetry at all, when we could have. They make us study William Shakesphere in high school. Why not introduce his poetry first in middle school? It’s far more accessible than his damn plays. The works of Edgar Allen Poe are generally well known through cultural osmosis; as such there’s no reason why you shouldn’t introduce his works. The best part about both these writers is that you can appreciate how their poems sound when you read them aloud, even if you don’t get the inner meaning of those poems right off the bat.
There have been a lot of opportunities to introduce poetry reading and reading comprehension in poetry, and I would argue that is more important than knowing how to write poems. But for whatever reason, at least when I was growing up, we never prioritized poetry. So, I’m not surprised we have a generation, or two that don’t really understand poetry. It was made inaccessible by the way it was taught, and that is a shame.
