HE essential likeness between

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poets and children has long been recognized in literature. In his essay on Shelley, Francis Thompson shows to what a marked degree Shelley carried over into poetry "the child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power". He is the "enchanted child" still at play. "The universe is his box of toys. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. . . . He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies."

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Modern psychologists reiterate this similarity, but the emphasis is changed. Whereas literature is concerned with the childlike qualities in poetry, psychology draws our attention to the poetic qualities inherent in childhood. If, as the latest theories claim, "all our emotional patterns are set before seven", then these years assume an entirely new significance, and whatever we can discover concerning the early development of the creative impulse becomes of more than personal interest. Psychology has freed us from self consciousness regarding the feats of our own children. It has taken the information concerning them out of the anecdotal class and placed it in the field of science. In his detailed study of his own children, Rasmussen, the great Danish psychologist, makes a special plea for similar records of many children, so that an accurate knowledge may be acquired, individual charac

teristics separated from universal traits, and general laws indicated.

The creative impulse is, of course, discernible in all children. Every mother knows the value a child puts on anything he has made himself the shoebox train, the clumsily whittled boat with a handkerchief for a sail, the puckered doll's dress - for these the most elaborate store toys are neglected. But it was left for the psychologists to calculate the disastrous results of a lack of creative outlet. The fact that our sanitariums are filled with neurotics who had the artist's temperament, without the artist's opportunity or ability to create, is gradually working its way back and transforming the nursery and the school. We are giving our children blocks of wood and stone, with which they can build towers and castles and skyscrapers. Crayons and paper have taken the place of the old fashioned painting book, with its hard and frequently unlovely outlines. A child's idea of painting is no longer limited to a pitiful effort not to run over the edges. Colored paper for cutting out, linoleum for block prints, clay for modeling, are waiting for the child to play with in his own way and in children the play spirit and the artistic are so closely connected as to be almost identical.

Language is simply another of the raw materials of art with which children play instinctively and from which, if given the opportunity, they create

interesting and beautiful things. Their attitude toward words is not so completely utilitarian as it is usually supposed to be. A baby's first sounds are, to be sure, intimately associated with his needs, but surprisingly soon we find children taking delight in words regardless of their meaning. Just as they pull bright ribbons from our bureau drawers, so they pick strange and melodious words out of our conversation. They will go about for days at a time repeating over and over something that amuses or pleases them. They play with words as if they were toys even before they have acquired the ability to form complete sentences.

But if we give children the opportunity, they will do more than play with isolated words. They will use language as material with which to recreate their own experience. They will tell us stories. We read to them too much and listen too seldom. When Hilda Conkling wrote in the dedication poem to her mother:

In many of the newer schools a regular time is set for the children's story telling. My own experiment in listening to my two small boys began almost as soon as they could talk, with the game of "and". We started by taking turns with familiar stories "The Gingerbread Man", "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", "The Little Engine that Could", etc. All these stories have a definite chorus; one of us would tell the narrative, and the other two come in on the repetition. This active participation added greatly to the children's interest, and eliminated the restlessness mothers so often encounter when they simply read to

a small child. Very soon we began making up our own stories as we went along. When the plot got complicated we would stop dramatically and point at someone else with a challenging — "and". It was surprising how complicated those plots would always become. Telling a complete story was the natural outcome of these continued-by-somebody-else games.

One of the children would become so interested in what he was saying that he would ask to finish it himself.

The result for me has been not only great fun at the time, but a quick approach to an understanding of the children's characters. Scott, who is five, is an active, objective person with a vivid sense of the ridiculous. His stories emphasize and illustrate these traits. When his little boys or rabbits or squirrels go walking they invariably meet with the most astonishing adventures. His mind is inventive and dramatic. Plot and comedy predominate in his stories. His drawings show the same tendencies - he makes people and animals in action, trains and boats which he always manages to suggest are going somewhere.

Eliot, who is a year older, fills his pictures with trees and flowers, mountains and houses. His stories, when he attempts to finish them himself, trail off without any definite idea of direction. But he is happiest in what he calls "poems", brief descriptions, unrhymed, rhythmic images possessing an inherent pattern. Unlike his stories, which had their origin in a game and sometimes carry over personages met in literature - Columbus, Leif Erickson, giants and Erickson, giants and princesses Eliot's poems seem to have sprung directly from his personal observation of nature. By this I mean that they have never followed immediately after reading, but rather after seeing.

Searching in my mind to discover what influence the poetry read to him has had on his own expression, I am forced to eliminate nearly everything - Mother Goose, Stevenson, Eugene Field, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare, and even the recent and adored A. A. Milne. There are no traces of them in his short and intrinsically childish "vers libre". If any literary kinship can be said to exist between a child and an adult, perhaps Eliot is nearest to Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. "Rootabaga Pigeons" with its fantastically beautiful imagery and humorous juggling of words has always appealed to him, though other mothers have protested that they could not read it to their children. He loves Vachel Lindsay's "Potato Dance", "The King of Yellow Butterflies", and "The Bronco that could not be broken of Dancing". How far these, or any others he has heard, have entered into his consciousness, it is impossible to tell, but it is quite obvious that his poems are typical expressions of a child's spontaneous reaction to the world about him.

Out of more than a hundred of these poems, written down exactly as he said them, I have selected a few to consider in detail, because they contain the elements of both childish and poetic fancy. Their content belongs to every imaginative child-rain and wind, clouds and stars, birds and squirrels and flowers. It is impossible for an adult to recollect how close children are to nature, what a fresh and sufficient miracle the world of reality is to them. Grown people need elves and fairies, extraneous and exotic additions to a world grown too familiar. Left to themselves children instinctively create their own mythology. Their interest in things is at the same time objective and imaginative with children, as

with poets, fancy and reality are inseparable.

Eliot's first poem, which he told to me when he was just three years old, seemed to be an unconscious rather than a conscious expression. The five lines came together as a whole, and were said in a queer enchanted tone quite different from his usual voice. This poem illustrates the trick familiar to a child of endowing objects like the moon and stars and trees with emotions of his own.

I did see the stars in the sky,
I did see the moons yesterday,
Moons dance in the sky,
Trees bow to them,

"Have a happy time!"

No similar expressions emerged for nearly a year. Then, in November when he was almost four, he told six more. And after that they came in bunches, usually at the turn of the seasons. The first days of spring, the beginning of fall, the first snow, have always been the starting points of his creative impulse. It has, of course, been a perfectly spontaneous adventure for him, not a part of the story telling game, though probably a personal departure from that habit. I have never bothered him with urging; in fact, it is generally when I am quite busy about something else that he comes to me saying, "I have a poem in my head." That is all. I simply write down what he says. Occasionally, he will ask me to read over what I have written, and will go on from there. But he never corrects, and seldom hesitates for a word. The way of saying a thing springs directly from the thing itself. It is interesting that his special voice has persisted, seeming to mark in his mind the difference between poetry telling and conversation

accenting the rhythm and making definite the line. This characteristic was particularly noticeable in one of his four year old poems to which for the first time he gave a title. As I read it now I can still hear the cadence of his voice.

ALL ABOUT THE OUTSIDE –
ABOUT THE SKY

Little birds are flying in the sky,
The birds are all flying,
The eagles are flying,

All different birds are flying.

And trees, and trees, and trees, Over the mountains,

And over the mountains,

And over the mountains.
Grass is growing,
Around and around,

And the sky is all around.

Rhythm and repetition children use instinctively. They delight in recurring sound "over the mountains

and over the mountains - and over the mountains". It is by repetition that they achieve poetic form. Rhyme is a more sophisticated art. It belongs to the skilful fingers of an Elinor Wylie, who can use it with the subtle variation of "Miranda's Supper". In a child's hands rhyme inevitably makes for monotony. I have seen verse by children, between nine and eleven, in which the unnatural effort to find rhyming words destroyed the child's entire thought, and prevented any original expression.

The perception of likeness, the happiness in discovering relations between dissimilar things, belongs to children as well as to older poets. It is the essential stuff from which poetic imagery is made. Three of Eliot's poems, written between the ages of four and five, show the way in which a child can employ his perceptions. The inversion in the last line of "Butterflies" is worth noticing, because it breaks the monotony of the list of

comparisons by an unexpected turn a trick adults frequently use with intention.

BUTTERFLIES

The butterflies are flying,
Quite up and quite down,

The little ones and the mother ones.
White ones look like snow,

And red butterflies look like red curtains, And blue flowers look like blue butterflies. (just four)

ABOUT THE FALL

Leaves are turning as red as can be,
And leaves are falling off the trees,
Woo, woo, w0000,

Wind sounds like a fire engine rushing down

the street.

Leaves are rattling and shuffling, Dead leaves are blowing in the wind. (five)

CLOUDS

I look carefully, carefully, at clouds,
And see little squirrels all bunched up,
Little squirrels holding their nuts,
And breaking them
And blue water.

One time when the sun was going to bed,
I saw something, really and truly,
A little boy sitting down.

.......

In the night when I look up,
I see little pebbles of stars,
And the lady moon sailing, sailing past.
(five)

In "Clouds" we see that the child is consciously observing with great care, and trying to convince us of the surprising things he has discovered.

Jack Frost, a character especially vivid to most children, appears in many of Eliot's earlier poems, and illustrates the way children personify the active forces of nature which they cannot explain.

Jackie Frost draws pictures,

And Jackie Frost bites and bites -
Not big bites,

Just taking a nibble,

And Jackie Frost makes pictures
On everybody's window.
(just four)

BIRDS FLYING

Birds are flying in the sky,
They fly all together,

They unhitch and fly by themselves,
They fly in circles up and down,
And then, they fly together again.
Pigeons do it in autumn.
Swallows fly like waves,

They fly like icicles, falling straight down, Birds fly as if they were dancing in the sky. (just six)

How far these poems of Eliot's are typical and in what particulars they are individual, it is impossible to determine conclusively; there is no anthology of the poetry of children under seven with which to compare them. Perhaps these notes will encourage other parents to preserve the early poetic expressions of their children. By doing so they can accomplish two important things: they can add to the general psychological knowledge of the development of the creative faculty, and they can foster whatever latent ability the children possess. It is not that I imagine for a moment that Eliot or many of the other children will necessarily become poets. But the qualities evolved through creative experience have utilitarian as well as artistic value. Accurate observation is a requirement of the scientist as well as of the poet; the power to translate experience into fitting words is important in ordinary living; imagination is a business asset as well as a literary one. And it is precisely these qualities that can be developed by the practice of poetic activity. Aside from these more remote values, there is the immediate happiness a child finds in expressing his newly formed ideas. And to us, who have grown away from those ideas, the poetry of children is an authentic revelation of the special outlook of childhood.