Every child reads comical poetry books such as The Giving Tree during their childhood. Its author, Sheldon Allan Silverstein, was one of the most recognizable children’s poets and poetry icons that has ever lived. He holds a household name due to the fact that despite his past he is able to help form a future in language, poetry, and the arts for the innovators of tomorrow. Silverstein’s works captured the essence of a person’s childhood and changed poetry and children’s literature forever.
Shel Silverstein was not always the poetry icon he quickly became in the mid-20th century. He was born on September 25, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois during the Great Depression. Silverstein was not a very sociable child. His hobbies included drawing cartoons and writing. Silverstein used to trace cartoons of Al Capp, as a boy. As a result, his professional drawing and writing career began with cartooning and writing for Playboy Magazine, in 1952. He was also not popular with girls during his teenage year which motivated him to write more mature poetry in the future about love. Silverstein wanted to reach out to all age groups and express that his talent was not only used for the entertainment of children, but for everyone. Silverstein did not write to impress others “… he did “hope that people no matter what age, would find something to identify… and experience a personal sense of discovery”” in his poetry (Shel Silverstein 1999). Silverstein was divorced and had one daughter who passed away in her childhood. He assisted in the armed forces during the 1950’s, and participated in the Korean and Japanese War. Silverstein died in Key West, Florida on May 10, 1999 of a serious heart attack, at age 68. His legacy withstands today by the impact that h...
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...s work is praised by the 21st century and most likely will be praised by future generations. Silverstein’s poems, books, lyrics and illustrated cartoons are essentially his legacy.
Works Cited
“Shel Silverstein.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Vol.19. Detroit: Gale, 1999.
Biography in Context. Web.14 Mar. 2014.
“Silverstein, Shel.” World Book Student. World Book, 2013. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.
"U.S. History Timeline 1900–1949." Infoplease. © 2000–2014 Pearson Education, publishing as
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Shel Silverstein is highly regarded as one of the best poets and authors of the 20th century. As a child, Silverstein had no poetic role model, hence he created his own form of writing: Free Verse. Although, he had no basic knowledge of poetry and his foundation was based purely on free verse, he later quickly became an outstanding poet and even a song composer. “Silverstein grew up in Chicago, and began writing and drawing at a young age” (poets.org). During his military career, Mr. Silverstein began making cartoons for the military’s magazine Stars and Stripes.
Walt Whitman’s early life and childhood had an impact on his works of poetry later in his life. Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York. His parents were Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. At the age of four, Whitman and his family moved to Brooklyn, living in a series of different houses due to bad investments by his parents. Whitman later viewed his childhood as sad and unhappy, because his family frequently moved and they were in a poor financial situation.
After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for political commentary as some might suggest or was he simply another “childhood” that had; until that time, been ignored? If so, what inspired him to move in this direction?
Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a tale of poignant family relationships and childhood and also of grim privation. The story revolves around the protagonist of the story, young Francie Nolan. She is an imaginative, endearing 11-year-old girl growing up in 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. The entire story revolves around Francie and the Nolan family, including her brother Neelie, her mother Katie and her father Johnny. An ensemble of high relief characters aids and abets them in their journey through this story of sometimes bleak survival and everlasting hope. As we find out, the struggle for survival is primarily focused against the antagonist of this story, the hard-grinding poverty afflicting Francie, the Nolan’s and Brooklyn itself. The hope in the novel is shown symbolically in the “The “Tree of Heaven””. A symbol used throughout the novel to show hope, perseverance and to highlight other key points.
I have elected to analyze seven poems spoken by a child to its parent. Despite a wide variety of sentiments, all share one theme: the deep and complicated love between child and parent.
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” displays a past relationship between a child and his father. Hayden makes use of past tense phrases such as “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking” (6) to show the readers that the child is remembering certain events that took place in the past. Although the child’s father did not openly express his love towards him when he was growing up, the child now feels a great amount of guilt for never thanking his father for all the things he actually did for him and his family. This poem proves that love can come in more than one form, and it is not always a completely obvious act.
Poems are often designed to express deep feelings and thoughts about a particular theme. In Theodore Roethke’s poem, My Papa’s Waltz, and Ruth Whitman’s poem, Listening to grownups quarreling, the theme of childhood is conveyed through their details, although we can neither see a face nor hear a voice. These poems are very much alike in their ideas of how their memories pertain to the attitudes of their childhood; however, the wording and tones of the two poems are distinct in how they present their memories. The two poems can be compared and contrasted through the author’s use of tone, imagery, and recollection of events; which illustrate each author’s memories of childhood.
Shel Silverstein is one of the highest selling children's authors (10 interesting facts about Shel Silverstein). Silverstein was best known for his works as a poet, songwriter and singer, cartoonist, and musician (Shel Silverstein Biography Bio.com). Sheldon Allan Silverstein was born to Nathan and Helen Silverstein (Shel Silverstein Life & Timeline). He was married one time which later ended in a divorce (Shel Silverstein Life & Timeline). Within that marriage he had a daughter, however, his daughter later passed away at the age of 11 (Shel Silverstein Life & Timeline). Another thing about Shel Silverstein is he didn’t originally began writing children's books (Shel Silverstein Biography Bio.com). In, short Shel Silverstein is a high selling
Laura Ingalls Wilder may be viewed as one of the greatest children’s authors of the twentieth century. Her works may be directed towards a younger crowd but people of all ages enjoy her literary contributions. The way that Wilder’s books are written guarantees that they have a place among classics of American literature (“So many…” 1). Laura Ingalls Wilder’s form of writing portrays an American family’s interworking in a journey through childhood.
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.
Life and death are two things that we as humans must all face. The road from one to the other, from life to death, is a long and at times, both joyous and painful one. Robert Frost’s poems are a prime example of these times and trials. The poems I chose for this paper highlight them, and with Frost’s allegory, they present a sort of silver lining to the string of dark and dreary words he’s pieced together for these poems. The depressing tone to the poems “Acquainted with the Night”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowing Evening” could be attributed to the death of many of Frost’s family members, and how despite this he overcame it all, and at the end of his life, was a successful writer. These poems to not go into great explanation of the details of Frost’s life, however, I believe that they are representations of the things path that he’s walked, and how he viewed his actions and death in general.
For any educator that is searching for a poem to arouse the interest of students enlisted in upper level literature classes, the poem “In the Orchard” by Muriel Stuart, written in the early twentieth century, conveys the ageless theme of unrequited love. The poem has all the elements of making students understand how far back the feeling of unrequited love has been around. We can understand these elements better through the rhetorical strategies.
The search for immortality is not an uncommon one in literature. Many authors and poets find contentment within the ideals of faith and divinity; others, such as Whitman and Stevens, achieve satisfaction with the concept of the immortality of mortality. This understanding of the cycle of death and rebirth dominates both Walt Whitman's "On the Beach at Night" and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" and demonstrates the poets' philosophies of worldly immortality.
...he refreshing presence of a man and a writer who was entirely himself and who loved nature and his fellow men.” Today, many young and old Americans might not be familiar with the name Walt Whitman, but his influence on American society and culture remain. With his influence on the ideas and styles of writers following him, his legacy and influence will continue to endure.
In the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth, this difference between children and adults and their respective states of mind is articulated and developed. As a person ages, they move undeniably from childhood to adulthood, and their mentality moves with them. On the backs of Blake and Wordsworth, the reader is taken along this journey.