The Poetics of Childhood

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Roni Natov Brooklyn College of the City
University of New York
The Poetics of Childhood Routledge 1st edition
(2002 )
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the poetics of childhood

• I personal experience
• ? common experience
• II scope of poetics of childhood

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Outline

• Chapter 1 Constructions of Innocence
• Chapter 2 Carroll and Grahame
• Two Versions of Pastoral

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William Blake (1757-1827)
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William Blake

• 1. Without Contraries is no progression.
• 2. Children Lost and Found
• 3. To See a World in a Grain of Sand

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1 Without Contraries is no progression.
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Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
(1793-1818) 1

• 1 Innocence is a fragile state, and only in art
  can it be captured metaphorically in moments.
• 2 Higher innocence can be glimpsed in visions. It
  takes shapes in the real world, and mostly in the
  figure of the child.

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3 two types of innocents

• 3.1 those who feel unself-consciously untied
  with the world

Infant Joy "I have no nameI am but two days
old."What shall I call thee?"I happy am,Joy is
my name."Sweet joy befall thee!
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two types of innocents

• 3.2 those who unself-consciously prolong that
  state

The Little Black Boy
The Chimney Sweeper
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Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
(1793-1818) 2

• 4 The central concern of the two Songs seems not
  so much Innocence or Experience, but the
  borderline between them (11)

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Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
(1793-1818) 3

• 5 Blakes visions of Innocence are
  representations of the unity of past and future,
  and of the connection between all thingsthe
  worldly glimpsed in visions of the heavenly, and
  vice versa.

The Divine Image
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Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
(1793-1818) 4

• 1 Experience was the fallen world.
• The child became the creature furthest and
  freest from the fallen world, but within the
  child, Innocence battles with Experience toward
  some vision of release from its shackles.

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2. Children Lost and Found
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the primal fear of children
The Little Boy Found
The Little Boy Lost
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a young girls vulnerability
The Little Girl Found
The Little Girl Lost
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Acceptance of desire is essential to the state of
higher Innocence.
A Little Boy Lost
A Little Girl Lost
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3 To see a World in a Grain of Sand
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Blakes holistic vision

• 1 sense of the unity of all things
• 2 He saw the many in the one, which represented
  the potential for higher Innocence in every
  element and every living thing.

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frontipiece of Songs of Experience
frontipiece of Songs of Innocence
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To see a World in a Grain of Sand ??????????And
a Heaven in a Wild Flower, ??????????,Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand ????????And
Eternity in an hour. ??????????Auguries of
Innocence
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On Anothers Sorrow
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1 The Natural Child 2 The Longing for Childhood
3 The Search for Consciousness
William Wordsworth (1770 1850)
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Wordsworth and childhood

• Childhood was the great source of inspiration.
• He connects the consciousness of childhood with
  the consciousness of the poet.
• We need to draw upon our childhood memories.

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The Natural Child

• We are Seven (22-23)
• Anecdote for Fathers (23-24)
• The Idiot Boy (24-26)

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The Longing for Childhood

• Though nothing can bring back the hour Of
  splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower
  We will grieve not, rather find Strength in
  what remains behind.

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The Search for Consciousness

• Central to this process is recollection,
  reflection, and meaning of the spots of time
  which point to how,/The mind is lord and
  masteroutward sense/The obedient servant of her
  will (XII, ll 222-3).

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The Child Poet
Opal Whiteley (1897-1992)
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The Diary of Opal Whitley

• Opal Whiteley was the spiritual child of Blake
  and Wordsworth, attuned to the natural world and
  to her own nature.

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The Diary of Opal Whitley

• deep connection to the natural world around her
  and her keen powers of observation
• ability to move from observation to reflection
  and to capture both in kind of epiphany
• sense of responsibility to the things and
  creatures she loves

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To what extent is the literature of childhood
related to the literary pastoral?
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pastoral and the green world

• 1 childrens sense of freedom
• 2 a retreat from the social world or injustices
• 3 a nostalgia for the past
• 2, 3 ? loss, and longing for a return to
  an earlier state, real or imagined a critique of
  civilization (91)

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the child and the green world

• the child serves as the green world
• (a figure of escape and possibility, a guide
  that leads us into the garden, a figure that
  engages in a quest) (92)

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the movement associated with pastoral

• forms of movement
• ( a retreat from and a return to the world, the
  retreat as a place of resolution itself the
  retreat has occurred before the story opens) (91)

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two trajectories

• Blake and Wordsworth as early paradigms
• versions of pastoral

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Blakes ironic use of the childs voice in his
lyrics is echoed in Carrolls satiric mode. And
Grahame was influenced by Wordsworths
association of childhood with the pastoral
imagery of nature and as the source of
inspiration for creativity. (49)
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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 1898)
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Carrolls Alice books

• Carrolls nostalgia
• nonsense humor
• unnatural landscape
• Alice as the disrupter of the Edenic myth of
  Victorian morality (50)
• critiques of Victorian culture

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The predominant irony of Carrolls work is
close to Blakes, when the child, in its
innocence, speaks against itself, and takes the
side of the very world that will expel it from
what it envisions as paradise. (55)
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Kenneth Grahame (1859 1932)
Cover of the first edition
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While Wind, like Alice stories, is propelled by
whats not resolvable in adulthood, here what
remains haunting from childhood memory is grated
respite in the liminal borders of childhood and
its accompanying states of dream and trance. (57)