The Value, for Children, of Different Classes of Poetry

       In children's reading ballads and other narrative poems will supply stories, and will appeal to the emotional side of a child's nature. Poems of nature will satisfy the girl or boy who loves outdoor beauty, but who, perhaps, has never cared for poetry. I have seldom known a listener, however youthful, who did not thrill in response to Lanier's "Hymns of the Marshes," especially if they were read so as to bring out the exquisite melody which the musician-poet put into them. The large group of miscellaneous lyrics will appeal to the boy's or girl's curiosity about the human heart, whose stirrings he or she is beginning dimly to feel. The love-lyrics, as well as the love parts in the other types of poetry, will do something toward satisfying the girl's desire to know more about the great passion of love which vaguely enfolds her future. There should not be separate reading courses for boys and girls, for they should not be encouraged to develop entirely apart from each other. While it is true, as I have said, that girls like to read about love and boys about battles, it is also true that each should cultivate the tastes of the other. Boys and girls are alike human beings; life will bring love to men as well as to women, and battles to be fought by women as well as by men. It is well that they should both gain high ideals of both the loving and the striving of the life upon which they are entering, side by side.

       The children who are thus trained and encouraged into a habit of reading poetry, and who thus become accustomed to appreciating the true meanings and finer values of life, will meet the world with an armor which is unassailable. However many of the external things of life are denied them, or taken from them; whatever disappointments and sorrows come, these one-time children will have that within their heads and hearts which can console them for material losses, and sustain them in sorrows. For, in the long run, it is what we have inside our heads and hearts that matters, -- both to ourselves and to the world as we touch it. If we learn, all our lives, from the great interpreters of life, the poets, the seers, we too shall see and understand.

Why we need poetry?

• Five Reasons Why We Need Poetry in Schools
• What is the value of poetry?

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