SOURCE: MacDonald, Ruth K. “The Poet's Place.” In Shel Silverstein, pp. 116-32. New York: Twayne, 1997.

[In the following essay, MacDonald discusses Silverstein's status as an author of poetry for children and evaluates the poems collected in his volume Falling Up.]

Poetry has long been one of the great unexplored areas in children's literature. Few reputations, of either poets or critics, have been built on it, since most acclaim and notice goes to novels. What criticism exists for poetry derives in many cases from the “beauties” school of criticism—pointing out the poetry's beauties, such as a poet's or a line's excellence, without any particular explanation of wherein the beauty lies. The reasons for this neglect of children's poetry are twofold: first, except for the most simple rhymes, the American population has a general distaste for poetry, a result of the second reason, the unfortunate way in which poetry is introduced to children in school. Poetry has for some time had to be taught to children, especially since it has lost its currency with the general reading public by becoming increasingly obscure and unavailable to any but the most poetically literate. Poetry has lost its audience because of the hard work it takes to understand both its form and its content.

The result is that children first meet up with poetry in school, where it is presented in a pedagogical, systematic way, with emphasis on the poems' literary and didactic values. In fact, since Isaac Watts, children's poetry has been, in the main, designed to preach. Most children, and most adults as well, realize that the poetry introduced at school is designed to propagandize manners and values that are predominantly Protestant and puritanical. In fact, from the seventeenth century to the present, the didactic mode of children's poetry has been the only justification that most educational theorists have been able to find for presenting it to children. The entertainment value, if any, was clearly and distantly secondary. Poetry has had “spinach” value—good for you but with little appeal to the palate. No one particularly thought to teach children how to enjoy poetry, thereby lessening its appeal even further. So teaching poetry has had a double detriment: it has conveyed the message that, first, poetry is difficult and cannot be understood without extraordinary linguistic tools and skills, and second, it cannot be enjoyed.

Perry Nodelman has admitted that, for all of us who do not read poetry regularly, the life untouched by poetry can be perfectly satisfying. Poetry has no minimum daily requirement; one's life is not deficient because one does not enjoy reading it. America's founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, insisted that citizens of a democracy needed to be literate in order to function responsibly, but such literacy did not necessarily demand poetic sensibility. On the other hand, Nodelman says that many more people would enjoy poetry if only they knew how. He points to those schoolchildren who read poetry without instruction on what and how to enjoy as being ill served.¹ Thankfully, Nodelman has nonetheless entered the void and begun teaching the pleasure in poetry that has long been neglected.

Fortunately, readers of Silverstein's poetry need no such compensatory education, and that is one of the beauties of Sidewalk and Attic: no special tools of interpretation, either for the pictures or for the poetry, are necessary. Although the volumes may have richer meaning and experience for those who understand poetic and illustrational techniques, Silverstein's poems are immediate enough that they carry plenty of weight and pleasure without the other knowledge in hand.

In his book Can Poetry Matter?, Dana Gioia likewise decries the distance between poetry and everyday readers but points to the success of regional poets in speaking to their audiences and attracting a readership. A regional poet's ability to speak using the diction that his audience understands, to choose topics in which the audience has particular interest and understanding of, to write about everyday occurrences in a natural, poetic way, serve both the poet and the audience well. Because the regional poet does not attract national or literary interest, the intensely loyal following of his readers is not well known to literary professionals, nor is the regional poet's distinctive success realized beyond the region. Outsiders frequently just don't get it.

Although Gioia speaks mainly of Midwesterner Ted Kooser as his exemplar regional poet,² all the guidelines that he sets for judging a regional poet a success can be applied to Silverstein, a kind of regional poet whose audience is children in the lower elementary and middle school grades, the region of childhood before adolescence. Silverstein does not expect to speak to a general audience of readers of all ages or even to children in general. If he succeeds with adults, it is because these adults remain actively connected to the child of the age and sophistication that Silverstein has targeted. One of Gioia's statements about Kooser could also apply to Silverstein: “There is little in Kooser's work that would summon forth a great performance. There are no problems to solve, no dazzling bravado passages to master for the dexterous critic eager to earn an extra curtain call. … [T]here is little a critic can provide that the average reader cannot, because the difficulties … are experiential rather than textual” (p. 95). Both Silverstein and Kooser, who do not provide anything for professional critics to latch onto, have attracted their audiences as champions.

Yet Gioia is not without standards to judge poetry's success; even the successful Kooser can fall short occasionally, as can Silverstein. But Gioia's guidelines are fair and sensible and give a handle on how to judge an individual poet's works. The poet's originality, not necessarily of poetic technique but perhaps of topic and voice, the scope of the volume and its integrity as a whole, and the poet's clear sense of addressing a specific audience are Gioia's standards, as are the number of perfect poems and the variety of the voice (pp. 97-98). There are admitted failures in Silverstein's volumes of poetry, as noted in chapters 3 and 4. But there are also those excellent models that are perfect, in expression, diction, word choice, and sometimes even meter, also noted in those chapters.

Finally, it is Silverstein's choice of topics and range of voices that establish his place among poets for children; he has been recognized even among literary professionals for his staying power and popular appeal. His topics are sometimes unspeakable but are certainly thinkable, and Silverstein has succeeded in Alexander Pope's poetic criterion of saying in poetry what is universally thought but nowhere else expressed so well. The voice in the poem “Whatif” (90), from Attic, about the negative possibilities that children are free to consider only during the dark night of the soul and only when they are alone, is one of Silverstein's most potent. Silverstein takes on the voice of the older child considering what might happen to him in the case of certain bad events, some of which are major traumas, such as parental divorce, others of which are less large but no less significant and frightening to a child, such as green chest hair. In “Listen to the Mustn'ts” (27), from Sidewalk, Silverstein takes on the avuncular voice of an adult advisor, encouraging a child in the face of all the social etiquette that limits him; the unclelike voice seeks to free the child's imagination, to let the mind's possibilities range freely. These are two of the more serious and successful poems in the volumes, but Silverstein also manages a range of other voices and topics that reliably succeeds in capturing what schoolchildren think about and how they express it—everything short of the swearing and obscenity that would call down the censors' and other adults' opprobrium.

It is Silverstein's subversion of topic that captures Alison Lurie's attention and commendation. Silverstein's subversion is part of his popular success, although it has mitigated literary recognition of his works. Literary critics continue to devote their attention to a canon of poetry that has messages and techniques acceptable to critics, teachers, parents, and other adults. But there are those books that Lurie calls “sacred texts of childhood,” those works she would therefore call “great” because they “express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at that time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking—as in Andersen's famous tale—that the emperor has no clothes.”³

Silverstein tells the truth to children, right down to the messy, open, inconclusive endings and occasional sentimentality. He debunks fantasy happy endings as lying to children and inculcates self-reliance as the best protection against life and guarantee of success in it.⁴ In his wish-fulfillment poems, about disposing of annoying siblings and parents and about manipulating parents, he gives voice to children's unspoken thoughts and sometimes becomes the subjects of children's private conversations. Silverstein's ideas have seldom before become subjects of poetry and are certainly not ideas that adults discuss without preachy rejoinder. But in such poems as “For Sale” (Sidewalk, 52) and “Clarence” (Attic, 154), about disposing of siblings and parents, Silverstein enters the fantasy so completely, with such gusto and approval, that the child readers learn to trust the poet and entwine themselves in the experience of the poetry. In Silverstein's advice poems, which are few but nonetheless genuine, he has the readers' trust so thoroughly that the didacticism is likely to be taken to heart rather than scoffed at for being treacly. Silverstein follows in the tradition of Isaac Watts in this infrequent educational mode and follows eighteenth-century assumptions about children's poetry both delighting and teaching, yet Silverstein's teaching is infrequent enough and the lessons taught so easily embraced that the primary motive never seems pedagogical.

Above all, Silverstein renders pleasure to the reader; that is the primary motive behind his poetry, and in it he succeeds. At the beginning of Perry Nodelman's book on understanding children's literature, aptly titled The Pleasures of Children's Literature, he gives a long list of pleasures that literature for children can give.⁵ On these counts, Silverstein renders full measure. The jokes are frequent and ribald enough to keep the reader's attention, yet the book is segmented into two-page spreads so that the reader avoids a surfeit of humor. Sidewalk and Attic need not be read continuously, from front to back, but can be sampled, placed aside, and reentered at almost any point. The reader need not put forth much effort to enjoy these books, and the enjoyment is fulsome regardless of the effort. The illustrations are both a lure and a gift from the illustrator; as discussed earlier, they, too, are easily enjoyed, and the code of the cartoon—quick, radiating lines that indicate motion, movement primarily from left to right to encourage forward motion, and few symbols, mostly faces and action with little background—simply supports the book's rapid, pleasurable pace. The easiness of reading both poetry and illustration also underscores the author's overall approach to life—easy, full of motion and progress, with short stops along the way to enjoy the view.

The physical appearance of these volumes simply encourages their easy pleasure. No cheap knockoffs in paperback have appeared. Both Sidewalk and Attic are still constructed of the same high-quality materials used for the first issue, with gold leaf on the spine and the author's signature on the cover. But this cover is seldom seen, since the dust jackets, with their distinctive white background and black illustration and lettering, mark a Silverstein volume with his signature design. The volume of poetry without its dust jacket simply does not appear to be authentic Silverstein. The heavy paper stock makes page turning easy, and the generous white space, between poems, between poems and illustrations, even between individual letters, makes the book a gift for the eye. A book like this is hard to lose and easy to treasure. It is definitely made for keeping when not in use and unlikely to be discarded, either unwittingly or deliberately—this is not a book one is likely to be done with permanently.

Silverstein fails as a technical poet for a reason: he invites the child, as the poet's equal, to join in a poetic moment. In order to do so, the poet must use language and poetic form that a child can recognize. As X. J. Kennedy and Dorothy M. Kennedy note, old-fashioned patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and sound dominate even the most contemporary children's poetry. It is as if “shaken only a little by those winds of change that in the 1960s and 1970s swept the mainland of American literature, poetry for children today seems an offshore island doing its best to stay serene” with poetic devices clearly antiquated in poetry for adults.⁶ If Silverstein pushes the limits of topics and voice, he wisely avoids pushing the limits of poetry and technique.

It seems likely that Silverstein knew instinctively those qualities that research shows children most prefer in poetry. Two studies, one a survey of the research, the other a survey of children, show that the qualities children like best in poetry are identifiable rhythm, rhyme, and sound patterns. But even more telling than the poetic devices is the poems' tone. Children's overwhelming preference, as reported in the research, is for humor in poems.⁷ Here Silverstein succeeds without question, even among adult professional literary critics. Such words as “uproarious,” “zany,” and even the more tepid “delightful” dominate the reviews of both Attic and Sidewalk.

WHAT'S NEW

After Silverstein's absence of more than 20 years, Falling Up appeared on bookstore shelves as a surprise.⁸ Twenty years is several generations in children's literature, and the reading public for children's poetry during this time habituated itself to the kinds of poetry that Silverstein had originated and popularized earlier. In fact, other poets carried Silverstein's tradition of the gross and disgusting in verse even further and kept current with new inventions and gadgets and language in the popular culture of kid life that formed the basis of Silverstein's early success. After 20 years, the scatological joking found in Falling Up has become common, and as noted earlier, Silverstein's books have begun to show their age. As a result the bawdy and bathroom humor in Falling Up now seems tame and almost nonchalant.

Much of what is new in Falling Up has to do with poetry about new gadgetry, especially that unavailable to the poet earlier. This is Silverstein catching up with 20 years of technology. Thus there is a poem about using a computer in the writing process, “Writer Waiting” (58). The computer's promise to make writing easier through word processing, however, has no merit unless the poet has a topic, something to write about; the computer fails to generate writing on its own, and the writer using the computer in the poem finds himself with low-tech writer's block. As most adults and children know, only a human can make a computer work, and finding inspiration to write is not easier because of new technology. Thus Silverstein ends the poem typically—a great work is promised while the writer sits at the keyboard, but the punch line is that he can find nothing to write about.

As might easily be expected, there are also poems about the ubiquitous use of electricity to power children's amusement, and there is even a poem about a Walkman and its uses and abuses. “Headphone Harold” (161) is one of Silverstein's peculiarly obsessive children, who insists on walking on the railroad tracks while listening to the radio through his headphones. His doom is obvious—he cannot hear the train coming. Even the TV remote control gets a poem; “Remote-a-Dad” (112) suggests using this dandy appliance to control fathers, the ultimate command being “off,” which extinguishes them. The overloading of circuits powering household entertainment and appliances also gets a poem, “Plugging In” (8). The punch line of the tripped circuit breaker seems inevitable, given the long list of electrical implements the family seems to be using at once.

Silverstein even occasionally flirts with the political issues of the nineties, though he nowhere pursues them as seriously as he does the issues of the seventies in the earlier volumes. In “Description” (78) children vehemently debate about what God looks like. One insists he is black; another, a girl, insists he is a she. But in this poem, which is a series of one-liners, the punch line belongs to the speaker, who claims to have God's own handwriting sample—unlikely though that may seem. The issue about God's appearance is muted by the preposterous, unexplored issue of having God's autograph at all.

There is a poem about animal rights, “Warmhearted” (59), about a woman who wears a fox stole that is still alive. The live fox around the matron's neck looks put upon but does not appear to be truly suffering. Nowhere in this book is there the persisting, moving poetry, like that found in the earlier volumes, about the political and philosophical issues that now preoccupy Silverstein. The old causes seem to have been resolved, and the new ones are treated less seriously and less extensively.

Instead, there is a pattern of poems about issues that seem typical of an older, gentler poet, one who is considering his advancing age. Even some of the obvious jokes seem more typical of an older person than in tune exclusively with children. For instance, the book's sixth poem, “Scale” (8), is about someone who is overweight, especially around the middle. He is sure that the scale he is standing on would speak reassuringly to him if only he could see it over his spare tire. The person on the scale is not an oddball character or even a pudgy child; this distribution of weight around the middle is typical of the middle aged and older. Although children will laugh at this poem, its target audience is more likely the middle aged and lumpy.

Some of the poems start by celebrating children's natural tendencies but at the end make concessions to adults rather than indulging nature inordinately or punishing adults. The most obvious of these is “Noise Day” (26-27), about a national celebration set aside for children to make their loudest, most irritating and disruptive sounds with as much abandon as they can muster. The poem is a particularly joyful and successful one, with its catalog of all the sounds that children can make, such as dribbling a bowling ball or slamming a door. But the poem ends unexpectedly with an adult's negotiated settlement. These noises can go on all day, but “[t]he rest of the days—be quiet please.” A younger Silverstein would have encouraged the children to keep it up until the adults were driven crazy. This is the voice of limited indulgence and adult need for peace and quiet, in spite of the fact that, with the exception of the last line, the poem celebrates childhood's exuberance.

Similarly, Falling Up contains two poems on old age that are the closest to the successful serious poems of the earlier volumes. “Stork Story” (166-70) suggests the process of reincarnation. As the stork delivers babies, so it takes old people away “[w]hen it's their time to go.” At their destination, an unspecified location, all their ailments are removed from them; their bodies are reconditioned, their brains are restored to the blankness of childhood, and then the stork takes them back to life as babies. This is a comforting image of death, one that does not press a particular theological point about dying but simply reassures a child reader, or a reader of any age, that dying is not something to be feared. The imagery is more reminiscent of a garage or a recycling center than of a hospital or of heaven, and the reconditioning happens painlessly and without sorrow. That the end is the beginning is also a typical Silverstein reversal. And yet this poem breaks new ground for Silverstein in that in treats the serious subject of death with a light touch but with dignity and without uproar.

Another poem about the aging process, “The Folks Inside” (144), explains to children that they, too, will age and that their potential to become old people is latent in them; it's just a matter of time until “[t]hose old folks / Down inside you / Wake up … and come out to play.” One wonders if Silverstein senses his own aging and mortality. Certainly the dust-jacket photo shows a more pensive, more accessible poet than do the earlier photos; his hands are folded in front of him in a restful, perhaps even prayerful attitude, his eyes making clear contact with the viewer. This is not the kicking, sneering musician or the reluctant, casual poet of the earlier dust jackets. The poet in this portrait is accessible, seemingly more gentle and quiet both inside and outside this book.

The illustrations have become both more adventurous and more problematic. In his attempt to unify each page's layout by placing the illustrations across a two-page spread, Silverstein occasionally puts the illustration's focal point in the gutter, something that beginning illustration students learn not to do in their first week of class. Overall, the drawing style has not evolved, and Silverstein still has some lessons to learn. On the other hand, there is an illustration on the end page, glued to the cover on the right-hand side, truncated at the gutter: two legs with shoes, the rest of the body lost in the gutter. These legs do, in fact, look as though they are falling, perhaps up, continuing the title even at the end of the book as a design element that demonstrates Silverstein's continuing unconventionality about illustration and what constitutes the illustrator's space. The artist's potential to joke seems much broader than earlier. Some illustrations reappear, with modification. The little bare man who traipses across the last page of Sidewalk and then trails his beard behind him through the index of the same book reappears here across the bottoms of the index pages with a placard in hand, which reads “One more time.” The two masks, happy and sad, from Attic reappear at the top of the index page, this time on children's heads. The children, a boy and a girl, round faced and startled in expression, wear the masks like hats with the visors up. Here we have both the old and the new brought together. One poem, on page 98, “Allison Beals and her Twenty-Five Eels,” even makes an illustrational reference to a poem on page 59. The eels and their uses are disposed of effectively, except for the one in the last line: “And one got a new job on page fifty-nine.” A quick turn back to page 59 shows that this eel functions as a power cord to a computer, its mouth open as if it were going to bite the outlet. Is this an electric eel? On the whole, Silverstein works harder here to tie the illustrations in with earlier works and with other poems.

One of the other 24 eels that accompany Allison through life demonstrates one of the most significant changes in the book's overall tone and conduct, though this significance is almost more important because of its diminution: one of the eels is a spare brassiere strap. Although the bra on the camel in Sidewalk is a significant image, here the bra becomes simply another item in a long list and not the most interesting or noteworthy. Its function is barely worth a titter. In the time between Attic and Falling Up, sex, sexuality, lingerie, and nudity have declined as subjects of humor, their potential for gaining laughs much diminished. So nudity in this book becomes almost accepted, even full, frontal, Playboy-like self-display.

For instance, two women, albeit cartoons, appear naked in this book, one, visible from the rear, prancing in wild abandon, “Dancin' in the Rain” (108) and clearly enjoying it. The other woman, in “Tell Me” (154), is visible from the front but places her hands, in both dejection and embarrassment, over her lower parts; her upper parts are not much detailed. Neither of these illustrations is particularly humorous or titillating, and the women's nudity is not mentioned in their poems at all. In the illustration for “Tattooing Ruth” (45) a naked man is covered with the markings of a suit, but he, too, covers his lower self with his hands, quite naturally and yet quite discreetly. The overall effect of the tattoos is to cover him fully and decently in a double-breasted suit. Never one to detail genitalia, Silverstein judiciously avoids doing so here as well. Although nakedness and sexuality are treated much more casually than in Silverstein's earlier works, the jokes about urination are much broader; in “Gardener” (68), a boy is sent out to water the flowers and is caught as he bends over, back to the reader, to urinate on them. One of the book's bolder jokes is about a person shaped like a helium balloon (“Human Balloon,” 125), full of gas from drinking Pepsis and Cokes, a commercial mention rare in this book and elsewhere in Silverstein. As the boy floats about, the narrator of the poem hopes, in an intended pun, that he “doesn't run out of gas.” Not mentioned is which end the gas might run out of. Because Silverstein is no longer breaking conventions of decorum and etiquette, which are much more casually observed in poetry and in the popular culture now than earlier, the poems seem much tamer.

Tameness and some human decency are what is remarkable here, especially considering the broad and sometimes bawdy poetry in Silverstein's earlier works. Even parents get their just deserts, with due deference and recognition of the complications and difficulties of their lives. Even in a poem as obviously titled as “No Grown-ups” (113), adults' usefulness becomes clear when the children in the poem find themselves having to pay the bill for pizza at the end. The tacit admission is that grown-ups are really quite handy, and children cannot long get on without them.

The most sympathetic of the poems about adults is “A Cat, a Kid, and a Mom” (104), in which each party complains that it is unfairly persecuted and urged to change, to become something against its nature. This is the first time in all of Silverstein's poems that a parent is a sympathetic figure. The mom explains, “Why try to make me wise? / … Why try to make me be patient and calm? / I'm a mom.” The mom, whose voice here is authentic and exasperated, simply explains that her behavior is a natural part of parenting, something that can't be changed. The child in the poem gets his own authentic voice—“why try to make me like you?”—and so does the cat. But the mother gets the last word, and her firm foot in the picture, the only part of her shown, suggests the firmness and finality of her voice and her point of view. The mom's insight and the equal standing of her complaint with the child's gives the mom her due, though this poem also admits the child's point of view. Moms are as immutable as cats.

However, adults are not always so sympathetic. The father in “Quality Time” (143) uses his son's nose as a golf tee; although the naive narrator sounds half ironic in his pleasure at spending such rewarding time with the father, the more knowing reader can see through the ruse and realize what most children and adults know: that there is no such thing as quality time without real interaction and that quality time is no panacea for the lack of time a parent spends with a child. Teachers are still not redeemed in this collection, and school is a special focus and target. “Crazy Dream” (168-69) is a potent revenge fantasy during a child's dream in which teachers are forced to answer impossible questions and are swamped with meaningless homework, then hung by their ears from a clothesline for bad behavior.

Silverstein also makes advances in his use of language and of nearly impossible rhymes. “Shanna in the Sauna” (103) practically picks the English language clean of words that rhyme with sauna. “Bituminous?” (134) catalogs the complex, Latinate vocabulary that confuses children. The title suggests one issue—what is the distinction between bituminous and anthracite? between inflammable and incendiary? The fact that this poem rhymes at all shows the poet's growing control over vocabulary and poetry techniques. Some of the poems celebrate peculiarities in the English language. “The Gnome, the Gnat, and the Gnu” (71) celebrates the silent g by using it in improbable places. The gnome, in gnomish English, concludes “[t]hat gnocking a gnat / In the gnoodle like that / Was gnot a gnice thing to do.” One of the more hilarious and extended poems describes the trial of “The Nap Taker” (140-41); the child is accused of taking someone else's nap, as if nap taking were somehow related to stealing or kidnapping. Few children take naps willingly, and taking someone else's nap is only a linguistic possibility. The humor is underscored by the accusing judge, who wears a nightcap. The peculiarities of diction are both explored and illustrated in “They Say I Have …” (75), about various facial features inherited from other family members: father's nose, for instance. Although the child's behind, his only unique feature, is not shown, ancestors without their inherited features are like a child's puzzle in which the child is asked to draw in hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. Overall, Falling Up does not contain the terrible failures found so glaringly, albeit occasionally, in Silverstein's other books; the language is more clearly written for recitation rather than for singing, and the poetry is more technically controlled.

There are fewer poems that preach than in earlier volumes and less celebration of the breaking of rules. But there is still that unalterable faith in the certain knowledge of the individual and in self-direction. Falling Up is a book less about changing the world and more about observing its oddities and humor. “The Voice” (38) inside of each person dictates “[w]hat's right for you” without intrusion. This absolute faith in each person's conscience is as iconoclastic as Silverstein gets. This theme, though potently stated here, is not sounded again in the book. There are two poems that comment on the problems of moral paralysis. The diver poised on the diving board who appears at the end of Attic reappears here, in “Diving Board” (24), still poised. This kind of procrastination caused by fear is actively discouraged in the poem. Silverstein also counsels courage in “Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda” (65), about three characters who all run away “[f]rom one little did.” Yet these poems are quieter and more reassuring than those that encourage wild abandon and creativity in the earlier books.

Falling Up ends with a celebration of time, of the problems of living in and for the moment. “The Castle …” (171) lies in the land of Now, which is where we all live; the problem is that Now passes so quickly and the castle is only a cardboard facade, so that once someone enters he's automatically deposited out the back of the kingdom and Now has passed. Now is only a moment that passes more quickly than a short poem. This is the poem of someone who knows that many nows have passed and that they are hard to hang on to. This is not the restless spirit at the end of Sidewalk, who finds joy in movement and in searching for elusive happiness, nor is it the poet who celebrates human potential in creating the marvelous, as in Attic. This is an older, more contented voice that puzzles over the passage of the now without lamenting and is content to contemplate rather than driven to pursue life. The poem facing this one on the left page, “In the Land of …” (170), is a celebration of reversals about some other kingdoms. The ideal kingdom is one in which ugly people are held up for public admiration. Some of the reversals are merely overturnings; for instance, in the Kingdom of Listentoemholler, steak is cheap but the tax on it is not. Although this book explores the contradictions and homophones in language particularly effectively, sometimes the logical pursuit of a point gives way to simple if unlikely invention.

Above all, this book succeeds not so much as a tour de force but as a big red bow, tying up some of the issues in Silverstein's productions over the years, showing his increased technical abilities as a poet and his greater concern for the design of a book as a whole. This book is not a bang, not a whimper, but a gentler, kinder book in which some of Silverstein's issues make a playful reappearance and others are resolved. The brashness is gone, which permits the kindness and decency to emerge. If a poet disappears from the publishing scene for 20 years, this is an honorable and excellent way to reappear.

HUMOR

In all Silverstein books, however, both early and late, it is the humor that sells, convinces, and persuades even the most reluctant readers of poetry. The range of humor in the books makes them appealing to a wide range of school-aged children. It is safe to say that the books are designed for literate children, not for the preliterate. The poems' humor depends on one's ability to read them and interpret the accompanying pictures. An acquaintance with, though not necessarily a love of, the written word and a rudimentary ability to take the cues rendered in the pictures make the poems inaccessible to young children unable to read and interpret the illustrations. The poems also contain a range of humor designed to appeal to children from first to sixth grade and to older children, including adults, who will nostalgically but accurately recall the kinds of humor that most attracted them to Silverstein earlier in their lives.

Though the scholarly investigation of humor is fairly recent and fraught with the difficulty of gaining serious respectability, given the propensity of the subject to take over the tone of the investigation, several scholars have nonetheless developed theories of children's humor and children's acquisition of various senses of humor. Wolfenstein and McGhee are the foremost theorists in the field, the first a Freudian, the second also psychological but more developmental than sexually analytical in approach. In spite of their divergence of perspective, both report, though for differing reasons, basically the same stages in the development of humor in the child.

The first stage, starting at one year old, has less to do with the child producing humorous situations and more to do with the child recognizing contextual clues that indicate that the situation is “just for laughs.” Between the ages of two and three, the child sees as humorous the reversals of sex by change of name or ascription of gender.⁹ Slightly older children find humor in play with names, especially nicknames, which Wolfenstein finds is particularly offensive to adults, who carry residuals of some ancient, primal instinct about the sacredness of naming.¹⁰ Less mythic analysts may find the same results in similar research, since Americans equate names with personal identity and dignity.

Children at ages four and five think that humor consists of making funny motions and faces. Their linguistic humor is reserved for the contemplation of impossibilities, sometimes linguistically induced possibilities: “Have you ever seen a horse fly?” (as opposed to a horsefly). Such questions do not demand an answer, as a riddle might. In fact, when Wolfenstein sought to teach children of this age riddles, they did not understand the punch lines and saw no humor (pp. 139, 147). Their own versions of funny stories were improbable and shapeless, tending toward no particular end other than an entertaining set of circumstances. For children at this stage and before, Silverstein has little to offer. His target audience has more linguistic sophistication and maturity, as does his humor.

Silverstein begins to appeal to children when they reach age six. At this age, children appear to like joking riddles, both listening to them and telling them. Both Wolfenstein and McGhee report the emergence, like clockwork, among six-year-olds of the “little moron” jokes. Neither reports particularly precocious children learning these rotely memorized jokes early, nor have they found that slow children learn them later. Neither specifies the particular developmental point at which such jokes begin to appear funny to the child or begin to appear as part of the child's repertoire of humor. Wolfenstein, who does point to the consistent themes in the moron jokes of fear of exposure and stupidity (pp. 98, ff.), also reports the jokes' concise verbal quality, which children feel the need to reproduce precisely (pp. 141-44). This is also the stage at which the child is able to control the body long enough to keep it still during the telling of the joke (Wolfenstein, 143); silly gestures are not part of such stories. Wolfenstein also reports the phenomenon that children of this age do not admit to having learned the joke from someone else or to having memorized it; they claim that they have always known it, or that it just exists (pp. 99, 123, 132). For them, jokes are part of the cultural unconscious and simply emerge when the time for telling them is right—this latter is my interpretation of children's sense of the timelessness of such stories.

Concurrent with the appearance of the first moron jokes in children's development, other kinds of joke riddles appear. It is important to note that the child in early grade school is dependent on rote performance of these jokes; the skill of the storyteller, the mood of the audience, the sustaining of the audience's interest are not yet matters of concern (Wolfenstein, 21, 143; Bariaud, 34). But the repertoire of humorous appeal expands, and it is here that Silverstein finds his youngest audience. For the child this age, Silverstein provides joke riddles, such as “What Did?” (Attic, 16-17)—“What did the carrot say to the wheat? / ‘Lettuce’ rest, I'm feeling ‘beet.’”

Memorizing a Silverstein poem can be a relatively simple experience, since some of the poems are only four lines long. The rhyme and rhythm, as well as the situation's short attenuation until the punch line, help the young reader/reciter remember the poem. Memorizing the poem makes it no longer Silverstein's but the child teller's, a part of that vast lore of childhood that simply is, without authorship. Bathroom humor, the kind that concerns not only feces and urination but also the exposure of the posterior, are prominent features both in children's humor at this stage and in Silverstein's books.

Bathroom humor appears shortly after the child learns control of his bodily functions; their silliness about it often results from the baby-talk words that adults use to describe feces and urine. Older children of reading age still find this subject matter humorous, though they demand more complicated joke forms to relate their amusement in and fascination with this otherwise forbidden topic (Bariaud, 27). Silverstein amply fills this need for jokes and riddles about bathroom behavior and exposure. Although children demand his books and read them, if these volumes ever find their way into the hands of conservative and censorious pedagogues, there will be book-banning attempts. As it stands now, the illicit experience of reading these scatological poems provides fun for children at an age at which the delights of reading and of poetry may still be shrouded in schoolteacher obscurantism. These are not poems for teaching; they are simply to be enjoyed.

Silverstein's poems provide the length, breadth, and variety of jokes to fill most children's need at this age for longer, more complex funny stories. This need stems partly from tensions that children frequently feel during their first years at school; they feel the pressure to achieve, not only from teachers but from parents. The “uproarious” relief that Silverstein's poems provide, if one may borrow a term from the reviewers, and the sheer volume of poems in his collections make the books good resources for stress reduction.

As McGhee points out, as children mature and approach their teens, they are able to tolerate humor in which they are the butt of the joke (Bariaud, 34). They become storytellers themselves, able to use intonation and timing and to create a mood and develop a story sufficiently to result in a humorous punch line. Silverstein's longer poems lend themselves to such storytelling, especially the tall tales—about being late for school, as in “Kidnapped!” (Attic, 159), or about not taking out the garbage, as in “Sara Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out” (Sidewalk, 70-71); Sara Cynthia is presumably buried by the accumulation she avoids. Older children's willingness to see their own behavior as the source of humor indicates a level of maturity that also signals the end of Silverstein's appeal. Although teenagers report resurrecting old jokes that they might have outgrown (Bariaud, 38), and although adults can similarly regress to the jokes of their childhoods (Wolfenstein, 156), a steady barrage of humor at the level Silverstein presents it does not hold these older readers' attention the same way it does for younger readers. Although adults can be convinced to buy Silverstein's books for children based on their own transitory pleasure in his jokes, children of elementary school age find themselves compelled to read the book repeatedly for yet more entertaining, sustained humor.

Silverstein wisely keeps Falling Up from degenerating into a collection of simple school-age jokes by interspersing it with poems that have not only a variety of lengths but also a variety of tones. Unrelenting humor is hard to sustain; Silverstein as a professional cartoonist knew when to change gears. His most consistent, serious concern is promoting the child's powers of creativity and ability to write poetry himself, to amuse himself and others, to think both seriously and humorously. Silverstein's direct, vivid expressions and obvious enjoyment of the same kinds of topics that children find humorous make these encouragements palatable. No teacher here is assigning a poem to be written, no adult is commanding children to enjoy themselves in spite of their own inclinations. The poet is simply a large child himself, capable of perhaps more complex linguistic productions than a child might be but on the other hand a large person still in touch with the smaller person within.

McGhee points to several positive attributes he found consistently among children who were able to produce humor for themselves and others: their language and social skills were more developed than others' their age; they were more energetic; they showed more assertive tendencies in groups; and they showed more concern for, as well as the ability to get for themselves, the positive regard of others (McGhee, 259). A teller of humorous stories of any age knows the pleasure of being the center of attention and of hearing the laughter of listeners. Silverstein knows it too and manages to provide children with the opportunity to get some of this pleasure for themselves.

In terms of the larger scope of American literature for a general readership, Silverstein, who places himself in the tradition of American humor as identified by Jesse Bier in The Rise and Fall of American Humor, debunks both by reversal and antiproverbialism.¹¹ Hamlin Hill claims that there is unlikely to be a single humorist who will speak for the late-twentieth-century United States because of the multiplicity of experiences and voices among its diverse population.¹² Silverstein's works have yet to attain a longevity to merit such a claim for his fame, and two successful volumes rarely constitute a claim to having articulated humor for an entire nation. But it may one day be clear that Silverstein, as the poet of American childhood and as the humorist of American child life, achieved something of that stature for the generations that read his books when they were first published. He stands as a literary predecessor of Jack Prelutsky. By the time today's children become adults and hand Silverstein's books on to their own children and pupils, even Silverstein's toilet jokes may be hallowed.

Notes

1. Nodelman, The Pleasures of Children's Literature (New York: Longman, 1992), 128.

2. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1992), 92-93; hereafter cited in the text.

3. Lurie, Don't Tell the Grown-ups, 4.

4. Lingeman, “The Third Mr. Silverstein,” 57.

5. Nodelman, The Pleasures, 11.

6. Kennedy and Kennedy, “Tradition and Revolt” 75.

7. Ann Terry, Children's Poetry Preferences: A National Survey of Upper Elementary Grades, NCTE Research Report 16 (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1974), 10-11; Carol J. Fisher and C. Ann Terry, Children's Language and the Language Arts, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 223.

8. Silverstein, Falling Up, poems and drawings by Shel Silverstein (New York, HarperCollins, 1996).

9. Francoise Bariaud, “Age Differences in Children's Humor,” in Paul E. McGhee, ed., Human and Children's Development: A Guide to Practical Applications (New York: Haworth Press, 1989), 19, 24. Hereafter Bariaud's chapter is cited in the text as Bariaud, McGhee's as McGhee.

10. Martha Wolfenstein, Children's Humor: A Psychological Approach (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1954), 75; hereafter cited in the text as Wolfenstein.

11. Jesse Bier, “The Rise and Fall of American Humor” (1968), in William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner, Critical Essays on American Humor (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 105.

12. Hamlin Hill, “The Future of American Humor: Through a Glass Eye, Darkly,” in Clark and Turner, Critical Essays, 225.