Fun *is* good, and Wallace Stevens agreed (it must be fun).

Maybe it's narrow-minded of me, or my natural distrust of market domination, but I've been down on Seuss ever since hearing this anecdote about Anthony Hecht:

Hecht decided that he wanted to become a poet. He announced his new vocation to his horrified parents who at once enlisted a family friend, Theodore Geisel, to dissuade him. Geisel, better known as the children’s author Dr Seuss, advised Hecht to read the biography of Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher. Surmising that he was being pushed towards more lucrative ways than poetry of writing for money, Hecht never read the book. Later in life, he joked that his main piece of advice to young writers was never to read the biography of Joseph Pulitzer: but perhaps appropriately, he took the Pulitzer Prize for poetry anyway in 1968.

So I've been wary since of Seuss. I think more fun is to be had with Good Night Moon, or James Marshall's Piggy in the Puddle.

Alicia, I remember you reading "The Cat in the Hat" to Miles on our couch in Basel when he was not quite three!

And your comments on why "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is not as good. :-)

Alicia, I was wondering if your son might be available for a critical review of my manuscript. Ha, I love how he frowns and announces "The End." I count Dr. Seuss as one of my major influences, along with Burl Ives and Shirley Temple, whose songs I listened to when I was sick as a child.

"All you need to do to appreciate Dr. Seuss's nimble prosody is to pick up any other contemporary book of children's verse. So much of it is so lackluster--full of clunky, predictable rhymes, barely scanning, and larded with filler. "

A children's book I intensely dislike precisely for this reason is the "classic" Goodnight Moon.

A subversive, slyly didactic, twinkling wink of a post!

Thanks!

Emily

Thanks for the comments...

I actually thought of including the Hecht anecdote--which I encountered in the excellent Between the Lines series, Hecht in conversation with Philip Hoy. Revealingly, Hecht calls Ted Giesel, "the cartoonist." I don't think the story reflects poorly on either of them, really. Giesel was put in an awkward position by Hecht's parents, and Hecht was right to distrust advice to disuade him from his avocation. One can see that the two men would not really be on the same wavelength--"fun is good" is not exactly Hechtian. But both will survive in their work.

"The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is a disaster! A warning against sequels. But the original "the Cat in the Hat" continues to amaze me. I think what appeals is that, like fairy tales, it gives a glimpse into a larger darker world--there is a sense of real danger behind the antics. There appears to be no father in the picture; the mother is out--the kids are alone, with the little boy in charge of his little sister Sally. A stranger comes in and breaks all kinds of house rules. There is the impotent super-Ego of the Fish, and the Ludic Id of the Cat. And I think, given the time period, "the Cat in the Hat" is almost like saying, the "dude in the hat" or what have you--only Seuss makes it an actual cat rather than a man. Eventually the boy stands up and takes control of the situation--and it all turns out fine. Though he pointedly does NOT tell his mother what has happened. I wonder if the book could even be published today! And all this using only 220 different words. (Green Eggs and Ham uses even fewer.)

Can you tell I spend way too much time analyzing children's books? What else is there to do when you read them aloud a half dozen times a day. My husband and I decided that Go, Dog. Go! would be great CIA code: Two dogs in the water. One dog under the house. The green dog is up. The yellow dog is down. Etc.

I think it was Miles who introduced me to the Gruffalo...

Well, Jose,
I think Good Night Moon is quite elegant--the pomo alternation between black and white and color, the gradual dimming of the light in the green room throughout the book, the repetition and variation in the text, the tension between what's said and not said, the little mouse, and the brilliant nod to nihilism in the blank "goodnight nobody" page, which teaches our children that there is Nothing Out There. However, if you really hate GNM, do what my husband does when reading it to our daughter: add an "R": Good Night Moron.
Daisy
PS I heard that the "Quiet Old Lady Whispering Hush" used to have a lit cigarette in her oversized bunny paw, and that this was removed in more recent versions. Can anyone say whether this is true?

I actually have no direct experience of "Goodnight Moon," though I hear a lot about it.

I think Daisy is quite right to differentiate between (illustrated) children's verse and picture books. A picture book is an integrated art form--there is often a tension or irony between what is said and what is depicted, or they comment on each other, and the two work in concert. Maybe the pinacle of this is Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."

A.E., Thanks for this post. I, too, have been struck with how several children's books that make use of rhyme and other prosodic elements have come to influence my own poetry in recent years, as I, too, have read books to a young child. "Go, Dog, Go" is one of my favorites with its sly and simultaneous complication and explication of prepositions.

Kay Thompson's Eloise books are yet another example. The run-on sentences and phrases, the invented words and terms, the method of arranging the lines on the page with attention to line breaks, the repetition and complication of words. Prosody is a living part of the language of these books, not a form to be filled out as in sonorous formal poets, etc. The language is dynamic, rather than using prosody to control or tame a text as do many writers of formal verse. I actually wrote a critical paper on "Eloise in Paris" during the course of my MFA.

Just wish to say that Seuss is now officially driving me mad, thanks to "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish." True, Maisie's little shudder of delight when we get to "This one has a little star, this one has a little car" almost makes up for it, but the freakin' monosyllables are really really getting me down.

I enjoyed this thread on Dr. Seuss. But let me put in a plug for his underappreciated magnum opus, DR. SEUSS'S SLEEP BOOK. Anyone with a child between six months and six years needs to lay hands on this right away. Really, the illustrations and verse are his sly Seuss-ish best. For example:

At the fork of a road in the Vale of Va-Vode,/
Five foot-weary salesmen have laid down their load./
All day they've raced round in the heat at top speeds/
Selling Zizzer-Zoof seeds, which nobody wants/
Because nobody needs.
...
What tired poet / zizzer-zoof salesman could fail to sympathize with the camel drivers splayed out beside their exotic wares in the drawing?

Sweet dreams,

Penelope Pelizzon