Up in the
Seattle area for my nephew’s wedding this past weekend, I found myself with a
little time to kill before we had to show up, so I dropped into the Upper Case bookstore in Snohomish and looked through the used book section. All too often
such a place will have little else but recycled paperback bestsellers, but this
joint was the real deal.
One of my
sisters (not the nephew’s mother) just came out with a book of poetry and
wasn’t able to come out from New York for the wedding, so I checked the poetry
section to see if I might get a little something for her. That was where I came
across Graded Poetry, Fourth Year,
published in 1905 by the Charles E. Merrill Co.
It was a
slender volume, edited by Katherine D. Blake, Principal of the Girls Department
at Public School No. 6 in New York and Georgia Alexander, a Supervising
Principal in Indianapolis. One of them presumably wrote the introduction, and
since the copyright has expired, I’ll quote from it liberally:
Listen. Just Listen.
“Poetry is
the chosen language of childhood and youth. The baby repeats words again and
again for the mere joy of their sound: the melody of nursery rhymes gives a
delight which is quite independent of the meaning of the words. Not until youth
approaches maturity is there an equal pleasure in the rounded periods of
elegant prose. It is in childhood therefore that the young mind should be
stored with poems whose rhythm will be a present delight and whose beautiful
thoughts will not lose their charm in later years.
“The selections
for the lowest grades are addressed primarily to the feeling for verbal beauty,
the recognition of which in the mind of the child is fundamental to the plan of
this work. The editors have felt that the inclusion of critical notes in these
little books intended for elementary school children would be not only
superfluous, but in the degree in which critical comment drew the child’s
attention from the text, subversive of the desired result. Nor are there any
notes on methods. The best way to teach children to love a poem is to read it
inspiringly to them. The French say: ”The ear is the pathway to the heart.” A
poem should be so read that it will sing itself in the hearts of the listening
children.”
No Dumbing Down
They don’t
make too many educators like that any more, nor do they publish textbooks like
this for the teaching of poetry. Perhaps you were wondering what sort of poetry
fourth graders read in public school 108 years ago. Well, you might recognize
some of the authors:
William
Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina G. Rossetti, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson, James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, William Wordsworth,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, James
Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others.
Of course
some of those writers were deemed advanced enough that they were held back for
reading until the second semester of fourth grade.
Generally
speaking, it’s a trap to believe that things were somehow better back in the
good old days, but sometimes you can’t help it. I wonder how many fourth
graders today are exposed to the breadth and depth of poetry reflected in this
book, and taught with the humane understanding shown in the quoted introduction.
Far too few, I suspect.
