The Words of Poems are Who You were: Contradictions and Continuities in Signs of Childness in Children’s Books

Abstract

In Hollindale’s Signs of Childness in Children’s Books (1997), the idea that adulthood is continuous with childhood co-exists with the idea that it is forever separated. Far from being self-contradictory, this reflects the complex reality represented within children’s literature. Focusing on the case of children’s poetry, in which the relationship between adult and child is characteristically different from that in other forms, I examine how those relationships may occur differently, what children’s poetry seeks to do in language, and how it relates to the body and to time. From this poetic perspective on what Hollindale describes as the “meaningful continuity between the child and adult self”, I argue that in the absence of the constraints of narrative, with its linear progression and child protagonist, a particular kind of childness becomes evident.