Abstract: In this essay I argue for positioning Robert Graves in the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) history of verse for children, at a pivotal point between Romantic innocence and modernist experience. To do so I also situate Graves in the context of a scholarly anthology on children’s reading, The Cool Web (1977).

Keywords: children’s poetry, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes

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To characterise Robert Graves as a war poet or as a mythopoeic poet would be expected, even normal for scholars of his work. To characterise him as a children’s poet is not so normal even though both Michael Joseph and Joseph Thomas have written eloquently about Graves’s work for children. For the MLA panel for which I’d composed an oral version of this essay, I had a different mandate: to explain why I’d set Graves as the hinge moment in my construction of the verse section I had assembled for the first Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (NACL), published in 2005.[1] As I’d never really provided a rationale or explanation for positioning Graves as a key transitional poet between the Romantics and the Modernists in children’s book history, the panel seemed the perfect occasion to do so.

Briefly — as a bit of a back story — in keeping with the Norton’s publishing mandate for its anthologies, we (the editors) knew that our task was to produce a volume that would construct both canonical and critical chronologies of children’s literature as a distinctive genre of its own. In the early 2000s when we were in the process of developing our volume, though there were obviously recognized classics of children’s literature the idea of building something like a canonical volume of the genre that could be used in introductory courses in children literature had not been attempted. With Jack Zipes, as lead editor, Lynne Vallone and I as associate general editors, and Peter Hunt and Gillian Avery as the other two editors, we set out to imagine what a canon of children’s literature might look like. It was Michael Joseph (who organised this panel, coincidentally), who developed the wonderfully comprehensive instructor’s guide for our volume, and I’ll refer to it later in the essay.

Norton Anthologies of English Literature — as most North American students who ever took English courses as undergraduates are likely know — are structured so that the narrative arc of the canon emerges out of a straightforward chronology of the anthologised selections. Our Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature had to be developed slightly differently because children’s literature is composed of many so genres: for example, adventure stories, alphabets, school stories, verse, primers, comics, fantasy, and religion. Within each genre we tried to adhere to the Norton mandate for chronological order while trying to shape a canonical narrative arc and also attempting to keep the permissions costs in check, something I’m afraid we ultimately failed to do successfully.

As I was responsible for compiling the verse section (and because we were trying to include full texts (rather than excerpts) of all selections) I appreciated that my task was to make choices that would signpost a narrative arc for histories of children’s poetry. At the time, putting Graves as the hinge moment seemed risky especially as the big-name children’s poets of the moment were Shel Silverstein (1930–1999) and Jack Prelutsky (b.1940), both of whom had built their reputations on being easily digestible rather than on the quality of their poetry. There is nothing the matter with ‘light’ verse. I just didn’t want it to take up space in the history of canonical children’s poetry I was attempting to map. That’s why Robert Graves is in the anthology while Silverstein and Prelutsky are not.

Chronologically in the poetry sections I devised for the NACL, Graves (1895–1985) sits between Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) on one side, and Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) and Charles Causley (1917–2003) on the other. In that rather crude chronology, Graves is obviously the poet straddling the gap between the Romantic innocent (and implicitly ignorant) child of the nineteenth century and the thinking/knowing child thinking, knowing, feeling child socially and now environmentally conscious child.

It wasn’t just the chronology that mattered in developing the children’s poetry canon for the NACL, it was also the mapping of the aesthetic and cultural shifts. In the instructor’s manual he composed for us — Teaching with the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature — Michael Joseph probably sums up best the shifting perspectives on children and childhood in this analysis of the narrative arc I’d created for the section.[2] In enlarging on the idea of children’s poems as aesthetic objects, Joseph explains that the shift begins with De la Mare leaving behind ‘the sanctuary of the nursery or its surrogate, the garden’ (thus propelling children’s poetry out of the cul-de-sac of High Victorianism), and initiating a ‘searching out of poetry as a re-engagement of with mythic material [...] and with tragedy’ (p. 144). He goes on to credit Graves with extending de la Mare’s attempt at ‘searching out’ a move towards transcending the divide between adult and child and then links Graves with Ted Hughes (1930–1998). I’d not included Hughes’s children’s poetry in the verse selection of the NACL as Jack Zipes had put Hughes’s Iron Man (1968) (or Iron Giant in the USA) in the fairy tale section and we’d made an editorial decision to avoid duplication of authors. But that’s where I would have put Ted Hughes and, partly as a link with Graves, I think that there is something about the development of poetry for children published in the second half of the twentieth century linked to the lived impact of both world wars on poets who grew up in the first half of the century. I can’t exactly prove it, but I think that writing for children gave Graves, Hughes — and possibly other poets — a path towards sanity (a word Graves uses), something to enable them to put the experience of war and tragedy into historical context.

Graves was, of course, both shaped by the First World War and contributed to our cultural shaping our cultural understanding of it. And although Hughes wasn’t born until 1930, the First World War also figured in his poetic imagination. Some of his earliest poems were about fathers (including his own) traumatised by the war. Both Hughes and Graves published their first works for children in the mid twentieth century primarily reaching an audience of baby-boom children born after the end of the Second World War, though Graves, of course, had composed many of his children’s poems in the 1920s. But his two major children’s collections for children were published in the 1960s; The Penny Fiddle (1960) and Ann at Highwood Hall (1964).[3]

Hughes and Graves are also distinguished by the fact that they were both typically revered as major British poets unmarked as writing for children. In the interests of full disclosure my own doctoral work (in the 1980s) was on arguing for Ted Hughes as a poet with a significant place in the children’s canon. To give you a sense of how much of an oxymoron that was considered at the time when I told an editor at a prestigious university press that my thesis was on Ted Hughes’s writing for children, he responded — with a look of unmistakable shock — by asking if Hughes wrote for children under a pseudonym. The implication was obvious: in his world, writing for children was embarrassing: something akin to writing porn or genre fiction. My point is that even in the late twentieth century, the idea that a serious poet could be writing serious (as opposed to hack or light) verse for children was hard to fathom. That’s likely one reason why I was so alert to situating Graves — via The Penny Fiddle (1960) — as the transition point between Romantic innocence and modernist experience in the verse section of the NACL.

My rationale for setting Graves as the mid-twentieth century hinge moment was that it also marked the making a new kind of implied child reader. With the innocent and ignorant implied Victorian child reader relegated to the past, the thinking, knowing creative child sensitive to tragedy as well as comedy could come into the focus. Graves, Hughes and a cluster of poets writing within the hearing of late twentieth and early twenty-first century children began to emerge, among them Theodore Roethke (1908–1963), Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Randall Jarrell (1914–1965), Charles Causley (1917–2003), Richard Wilbur (1921–2017), and James Berry (1924–2017). Jarrell and Causley are, in fact, in the anthology.

By the time of the publication of the NACL in 2005, the scholarly apparatus for children’s literature as a serious academic discipline was becoming fully established. It had its own Division at the MLA, and Johns Hopkins University Press had already started to publish several of the refereed journals in the field including Children’s Literature, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and the Lion and the Unicorn. There was a growing list of reference books and an ever-increasing number of graduate programs in children’s literature. That exponential growth of children’s literature as an academic discipline had been predicated on changes in three components: changes in theory, changes in authors and changes in implied child readers.

1. In literary theory: post-structuralist approaches including feminist theory, semiotics and reader response were replacing Leavisite and new critical approaches.

2. Serious writers, including Graves, Hughes, Jarrell, Causley Wilbur and Roethke were replacing Milne and Stevenson.

3. And finally, the construction of the thinking knowing, feeling child was replacing the innocent and ignorant child. Graves, as I’ll show, features here too, not quite directly but in the slanted way Emily Dickinson typically preferred.

In 1977, British scholars Margaret Meek (1925–2020), Aidan Warlow, and Griselda Barton published a remarkable collection of essays developed around the idea of taking children seriously as readers of literature. They titled their book The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading. What I particularly loved when I went back to it recently was that the editors were so confident that their readers would recognize the title allusion to Graves that they didn’t feel the need to identify it, not even as an epigraph or note in the introduction.

Graves’s poem ‘The Cool Web’ was first published in 1927 at the end of his collection, Poems 1914–1926:[4] that is, it was published in a collection of poetry not only unmarked as being for children but clearly inflected by his experience of the First World War. His ‘Cool Web’ still stands — ominously I think — as simultaneously haunting and arresting, Though Michael Joseph and/or Joseph Thomas (both of whom write eloquently about Graves’s prosody) would likely do the kind of intimate metrical analysis explaining what made the poems so compelling, I thought it might be best to cite the poem in its entirety:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,

And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent

We spell away the overhanging night.

We spell away the soldiers and the fright

There’s a cool web of language winds us in.

Retreat from too much joy or too much fear

We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

Throwing off language and its watery clasp

Before our death, instead of when death comes,

Facing the wide glare of the children’s day.

Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums

We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

The poem, like many of Graves’s poems from the period, invokes children and childhood but also clearly invokes war. In my own mind the poem is linked with another Graves poem, ‘A Child’s Nightmare’, which dates, I think from about 1916 when Graves was severely wounded just before his twenty-first birthday.[5] That poem begins:

Through long nursery nights he stood

By my bed unwearying,

Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,

Purring in my haunted ear

That same hideous nightmare thing,

Talking, as he lapped my blood,

In a voice cruel and flat,

Saying for ever, ‘Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…’

I wanted to include a little of ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ partly as it shares the haunting traces of First World War nightmares with ‘The Cool Web’ and partly because it also speaks to the essay in The Cool Web anthology that references the poem from which the volume derives its title. It is in the essay by James Britton (1808–1994), an influential British educator at a time when literature and literacy mattered. His essay, titled ‘The Role of Fantasy’, is set as the fourth in a sequence of essays subtitled as ‘The Reader’, and begins in a way that eerily reminds me of ‘A Child’s Nightmare’. ‘Sometimes’, says Britton:

as I am on the point of going to sleep, the image of a

hideous face comes to float above my pillow. It may

be a face that threatens hideously or one that is itself

hideously mutilated — but I suspect there is, deep

enough within me, a common origin for the two

versions.[6]

Britton then goes on to discuss (I’m quoting from the preface to the essay) that his essay is set in ‘an area of free activity lying between the world of shared and verifiable activity and the world of inner necessity’ (p. 40). As he moves to his discussion of Graves’s poem, ‘The Cool Web’, he alludes to the ‘walking paralysis’ of his description of his dream state, knowing that it is more ‘orderly’ than the dream itself. He then begins an extraordinary riff in the poem on the relationships between words and dreams:

To speak is to ‘articulate’, says Britton, ‘over a wide range of that word’s meanings; both to joint and to join; to provide with a framework to knit, perhaps, or to weave — and the web — as Robert Graves has suggested a cool one (pp. 41–42).

It is that cool web of language winding in the implied child of mid-and late twentieth century poetry for children I had in mind when developing the critical arc for the verse section. To be clear, I’m not claiming that Graves had a particular kind of implied reader in mind when composing the poems subsequently published as collections for children. I’m only providing the rationale for situating Graves at the hinge point in the NACL. And I’m explaining how Margaret Meek’s Cool Web anthology is significant in constructing the new kind of late twentieth and early twenty-first century implied reader. Besides James Britton, there are essays that still figure in what I think I’m doing when teaching children’s literature. There is Barbara Hardy asserting that narrative is a ‘primary act of mind’, and Frances Hodgson Burnett recalling beating up (whipping actually) her gutta-percha (that’s black rubber) doll because she was pretending to be Simon Legree and had cast the doll as Topsy. And there are C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden arguing for the child reader compatible with the child implied in Graves’s poems: an observant child absorbing and internalising the full repertoire of human emotions. That’s the implied child reader of mid and late twentieth canonical poetry for children, open to seeing, hearing, touching and feeling the world as well as acquiring the language to read and speak it.

Lissa Paul (PhD, FRSC), professor in the Department of English, Brock University works in Children’s Literature, eighteen century studies and Caribbean studies. She was an associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and a co-editor with Philip Nel and Nina Christensen of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2021). Both volumes of The Fenwick Letters 1797–1840: A Transnational Feminist Life Reconstructed will be published in 2026.

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