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Disciplined Play: American Children's Poetry To 1920, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

Children's poetry is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in colleges of education. American children's poetry, like American literature more generally, took on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and published by Americans. The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the child like qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent, it is really an adult voice making an adult point. The few poems …