[In the following essay, Rosenfeld discusses the popularity of Silverstein's books among children.]

Capitol Hill Day School, where my daughter goes to school, held its annual Poetry Night a few weeks ago. The kids arrived lugging books of poems they wanted to read aloud—Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll. But there was one poet who popped up again and again, his popularity undimmed by time or repetition: Shel Silverstein.

Silverstein died yesterday at 66, of unknown causes and alone. It's hard to think of death in the same sentence as someone who wrote such delightfully lively and goofy poetry, verses illustrated with his own funny drawings. Silverstein was the poet laureate of kids. He wrote poems they understand:

“GARDENER”

                                                            We gave you a chance
                                                            To water the plants
                                                            We didn't mean that way—
                                                            Now zip up your pants

Grown-ups are generally way too sophisticated to enjoy Silverstein. What they enjoy is watching their child read one of his books, discovering the pleasure of reading out loud, seduced by meter and rhyme and jolly subjects like “Jumping Rope,” “Dancing Pants” and “My Nose Garden.” Kids understand the logic of washing a shadow (“Shadow Wash”) or being “Afraid of the Dark.” Soon they move from the four-line poems to the longer ones, like “Clean Gene,” about the bath fanatic with 12 tubs in his attic. Or “The Generals,” in which General Clay and General Gore blow each other up.

Some of Silverstein's poems read like the musings of a child sitting at his school desk, daydreaming while the teacher lectures in a distant voice. Like “The Stupid Pencil Maker”:

Some dummy built this pencil wrong—
The eraser's down here where the point belongs.
And the point's at the top—so it's no good to me.
It's amazing how stupid some people can be.

Other poets write verse they can understand but other people don't always get, said Matthew Kresh, a fifth-grader at Capitol Hill Day School. His father, David, is a reference specialist in poetry at the Library of Congress and, as poet in residence at our school, runs Poetry Night. He has seen his share of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, but Silverstein always appears when the kids are asked to choose a poem they like. The way he writes, people laugh, explained Matthew.

His father remembers an earlier Silverstein, who wrote bawdy ditties set to Dixieland music. He wrote other stuff, too—including the lyrics to Johnny Cash's “A Boy Named Sue” and a play, The Lady or the Tiger—but attained true immortality with his books of poems: A Light in the Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up.

That last title, published in 1996, gives a sense of one of Silverstein's stock devices: turning things upside down. He is never sappy or sentimental. In his poems, boys break windows with baseballs, and girls scream so loud their jawbones break and their tongues catch fire. Sometimes there are useful morals embedded in the mayhem, as in “Headphone Harold,” who didn't hear the train coming.

A wonderful babysitter of ours, Michelle Stanton, introduced my daughter to Silverstein a few years ago. Marina picked up Sidewalk and could not put it down—a new experience for her at the age of 9. She read the poems to us, and we read them to her. She laughed and we smiled.

I never met Silverstein, but his book jacket picture shows a man with a shaved head and graying beard, with thick eyebrows and a serious gaze. He dedicated Falling Up to Matt and Sidewalk to Ursula. I hope he enjoyed being loved by legions of children, who discover through him the world of literary fun.

“THE LAND OF HAPPY”

                              Have you been to The Land of Happy,
                              Where everyone's happy all day.
                              Where they joke and they sing
                              Of the happiest things,
                              And everything's jolly and gay?
                              There's no one unhappy in Happy,
                              There's laughter and smiles galore.
                              I have been to The Land of Happy—
                              What a bore!