Putting Byron on the Buffet: Kids Love Big, Fancy Poems

I edit poetry anthologies for both adults and children. I make no apologies for not shying away from the big beasts of poetry when I curate collections for younger readers. Children aren’t scared of poetry – they are steeped in it from their first nursery rhymes and picture books – and they don’t have all the baggage that so many adults carry when it comes to poetry’s ‘greatest hits’. They haven’t yet absorbed the message that Shakespeare means trickiness and, possibly, men in tights. They don’t have a sense of Byron-Shelley-and-Keats as a boy band of winsome gentlemen with fancy ideas about stuff and fancier ways of saying this stuff. They’re here for wild adventures, gods and monsters and they haven’t heard of – and therefore aren’t scared of – poems written by Anglo Saxon or ancient Greek scribes.

I am deeply grateful for the guiding hand of wise and wonderful editor Gaby Morgan at Macmillan Children’s Books who will always tell me if I’ve fallen for something a little too knotty and sophisticated for young readers. But her confidence in the ability of children to understand and derive great pleasure from what we might think of as very grown-up verses has emboldened me. The anthology – the poetry buffet, with something for everyone – is the perfect subtle and unintimidating way to introduce younger readers to poems that older readers might shy away from, when really the reason that they have become canonical is precisely because they have so much to say to us all.

When I edited Gods and Monsters, a collection of poems about mythology, I knew I would be doing a disservice to young readers if I didn’t give them a taste of Homer’s wine-dark waves, or a sprinkle of Sappho. Within these pages, alongside clever, beautiful and funny work from contemporary poets like Sarah Ziman, Attie Lime, Nikita Gill, Carol Ann Duffy and many more, they’ll encounter Tennyson’s Kraken, Plath’s cavorting faun, Edgar Allan Poe’s sinister underwater city and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s mysterious Pan.

I was especially delighted to share Shakespeare’s Herne the Hunter:

              “There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,

              Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,

              Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,

              Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns…”

                             From The Merry Wives of Windsor, by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s is the first mention of this antler-crowned apparition in Windsor Great Park so we don’t know whether he invented the story or if he was drawing on older legends. Herne is certainly a figure who captures the imagination, though – he gallops across the pages of other beloved children’s books such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and poet Laureate John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. One of the great pleasures of reading widely is to see how stories are reworked for changing times, that electric thrill of recognition when we find an old story plaited into a new. While no subject could demonstrate this as clearly as that of mythology, it was deeply pleasing to bring one of the stranger, more obscure characters out of the shadows. I hope there will be a young reader who will feel an extra jolt of pleasure in the ways stories talk to each other when they meet him again.

Within the pages of Gods and Monsters, they’ll thrill to the roar of words by Mespotamian priestess Enheduanna, and shiver at the strangeness of an encounter related in the medieval Welsh Mabinogi. The variety of verse and the bite-sized chunks they’re served up in will, I hope, remove any qualms about their approachability. Chris Riddell’s glorious illustrations also give children a pathway into these poems, framing them as the thrilling, scary or poignant reading experiences they can be. It is more often adult readers, scarred by long afternoons in GCSE classrooms, who need help getting over anxieties around these superstar poets and famous works – so I hope they’ll pick up these books too.

Ana Sampson is the editor of anthologies including Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems. You can find her on Instagram or sign up for her free newsletter here.

 This article first appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit Blog.