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Friday, June 3, 2005
A glance at the May/June issue of The Horn Book
Magazine: The beloved children's poet whom scholars hate
Shel Silverstein, who wrote books and poems for children -- as well as bawdy songs, poems, and plays for adults -- is beloved by young readers but is less popular among scholars of children's literature, says Joseph T. Thomas Jr., an assistant professor of English at California State University at Northridge. "Few poets are simultaneously as loved and as despised as Shel Silverstein," he writes. "Something vital swirls around in Silverstein's work, something that children often can key into, yet something critics often fail to get." Mr. Silverstein's works have never won major prizes for children's poetry, he says. Some scholars say the works are too loose, that Mr. Silverstein did not take enough care with his word choice and depended too much on the cartoons that accompany many of the poems. But Mr. Silverstein, who died in 1999, had "a sensibility rooted in excess, in surplus," Mr. Thomas says. His children's poems were part of a larger body of work that was always changing and evolving. Some of the poems appeared first in Playboy and were intended for adults, before they were edited to appear as children's fare. And many of them were recorded as songs before or after they appeared in his books for children. The works changed slightly, depending on the form and audience. "There's a draftlike quality to all of his work," says Mr. Thomas, and "his success lies not in any one work achieving perfect form but in how each piece -- whether poem, play, or drawing, and whether for children or adults -- relates to the whole." Ultimately, he says, whether scholars like it or not, Mr. Silverstein has earned his dominant place in American children's poetry. "Shel's here, and, rest his soul, he's here to stay -- or at least his poetry is -- filling up bookstore shelf space, delighting young readers, and providing an easy target for academics." The article, "Reappraising Uncle Shelby," is not online.
Information about the magazine is available at http://www.hbook.com/publications/magazine/default.asp
--Kellie Bartlett
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