Poetry and Childhood

Poetry and Childhood by Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “Poetry and Childhood” argues that poetry’s deepest language is often the language in which childhood first received the world. Meynell begins from the intimate bond between words, early perception, and memory. A child does not merely learn names for things; the word and the thing arrive together, fused by first experience. For that reason, the language that first names a flock, an orchard, a river, a bed, a lullaby, or a parent may retain lifelong poetic authority. Poetry later reawakens not abstractions but original sensations: sight, touch, safety, wonder, half-sleep, and the small domestic mysteries of childhood. The essay’s central example is Victor Hugo. For Meynell, Hugo possesses a rare power to restore the words of childhood with grandeur and authenticity. His French is not merely national language but remembered infancy, romance, nature, and early enchantment. To a reader whose childhood was partly lived in French, Hugo’s ordinary words return with extraordinary force. A word such as “verger” does more than mean “orchard”; it recovers the very first shape, light, and feeling of an orchard as once known by a child. Translation, however accurate, places experience at one remove. Meynell contrasts this with English poetry. English has immense poetic resources: nature, scripture, classical inheritance, and great literary tradition. Yet, she suggests, English lacks an equivalent poet who gathers the language of nursery, sleep, childhood play, and early domestic life into a fully “august” lyric art. Hugo, uniquely, sings childish things without diminishing them. He gives infancy a majestic poetic instrument. The essay then broadens into a judgment on poetic language itself. Meynell does not simply praise French. Her allegiance to it is personal, accidental, and rooted in childhood memory. She argues that Hugo enlarged French poetry only as far as his own genius required, not from a shallow love of innovation. By contrast, later French poets, especially some symbolists, mistake metrical license for true poetic abundance. Their liberties loosen form without solving the deeper limitations Meynell finds in French. Those limitations are linguistic as well as metrical. French, she argues, lacks the range of alternatives that enrich English: alternatives of derivation, register, time, sacredness, and commonness. English can move among Saxon, Latin, biblical, archaic, domestic, and literary vocabularies; French seems to her more uniform, more available to commerce and everyday eloquence, less able to set aside words for prayer, poetry, or solemn difference. Even its syllables, in her striking comparison, “trot,” while Italian dances and English walks or flies. “Poetry and Childhood” is therefore both a meditation on memory and a critique of poetic language. Its governing claim is that poetry becomes most powerful when it restores the first words by which the world became known. Childhood gives language its private consecration; the great poet can recover that consecration and make it sing.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Essay, Literary Criticism, Poetics · 1,814 words

First lines

Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or whatever thing touched a child's mind with a remote and yet familiar love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading again the _Chants du Crépuscule_, the _Feuilles d'Automne_, _Contemplations_, and _Voix Intérieures_, I own the power of the poet who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger'. ‘Le verger' is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing and the word in one.

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essays · literary criticism · poetry · childhood · Victorian literature · Edwardian literature · aesthetics · imagination · education · language · memory · innocence

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