Taken seriously: American modernist children's poetry

In the 1920s and 30s writers across the Modernist spectrum published children's poetry, from traditionalists such as Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes, to experimentalists like Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot. These "crossover poets" wrote for children, but they have been considered primarily writers for adults. Their writing for children attests to the complexity and variety of Modernist poetic undertakings, and my study is part of the contemporary re-writing of Modernism. Scholars have revealed whole bodies of overlooked literature behind the major authors and works canonized by the New Critics, but little to no serious consideration has been given to the writings for children by Modernist writers of all kinds. My analysis of American Modernist children's poetry centers on voice, blending New Critical analysis with a cultural studies approach. I treat voice as historically conditioned, a function of genre, theme, and style. I emphasize the poetry of three writers, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. I read their children's poetry in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's poetry and against the background of their writing for adults. I trace the poetics of voice from two central and competing nineteenth-century traditions: pastoral and nonsense.; Roberts's children's classic, Under the Tree (1922), offers pure pastoral affirmation in the voice of the little girl. Here, Roberts developed the voice she would work with throughout her career. The feminized pastoral that characterizes all her works led to her eventual critical devaluation as novelist and poet. The children's book by experimentalist T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), is as traditional as Roberts's. Though it offers Eliot's most sympathetic approach to the pastoral "simple man," it is not pastoral. Neither is it nonsense, despite Eliot's admiration for Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll and their influence on his adult poetry. Carefully balanced between pastoral and nonsense, the almost exclusively male voices of the volume are ultimately mock-heroic. Practical Cats parodies the glorification of the common man and straightforward heroic voices in the children's poetry of Eliot's traditionalist contemporaries, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg. It accentuates the mock-heroic quality in all Eliot's work. Gertrude Stein's The World is Round (1939) places the pastoral voice of the little girl celebrated in Roberts's Under the Tree in dialogue with the masculine heroic voice ironized in Eliot's Practical Cats. Stein interrogates and repudiates the feminized pastoral, using nonsense, here and in the larger body of her work, to subvert feminized pastoral song. Roberts's traditional pastoral, Eliot's mock heroic, and Stein's radical experimentation all reveal the Modernist feminization of pastoral song and masculinization of nonsense, another instance of the gender and genre politics of literary Modernism.