The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America

Front Cover
Donald Hall
Oxford University Press, 1985 - Juvenile Nonfiction - 319 pages
Compiled by the award-winning poet and author of children's books, Donald Hall, this delightful anthology follows in the tradition of Iona and Peter Opie's classic Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Hall brings together poems written specifically for children and also those written for anyone and enjoyed by children and adults alike. He presents over two hundred fifty poems written by over one hundred different American poets--including anonymous works, ballads, and recitation pieces--that range from the Calvinist verses of the seventeenth century to the fabulous nonsense poems of the present.
Drawing on literally thousands of sources--including Sunday School magazines, Christmas annuals for children, and such wonderful children's periodicals as St. Nicholas and Youth's Companion--Hall gives the modern reader a rich sampling of many poems never before anthologized. He includes everyone's favorites, from Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a.k.a. "The Night Before Christmas") to the classic lines of Longfellow and Whittier. Along with Sarah Josepha Hale's famous poem, "Mary's Lamb," we find poetry by Emily Dickinson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Palmer Cox, Sarah Orne Jewett, Laura E. Richards, and Gelett Burgess. He also covers the twentieth-century with verse by T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), and Randall Jarrell, just to name a few. Hall concludes with the poetry of present-day writers such as Shel Silverstein and Nancy Willard.
A testament to a captivating tradition in American literature, this anthology will encourage many hours of nostalgic browsing and reading aloud to children.

From inside the book

Contents

Is There an External World?
3
I The Failings of the Senses and Intuition
21
II The Rise and Role of Mathematics
38
III The Astronomical Worlds of the Greeks
51
IV The Heliocentric Theory of Copernicus and Kepler
68
V Mathematics Dominates Physical Science
86
VI Mathematics and the Mystery of Gravitation
107
VII Mathematics and the Imperceptible Electromagnetic World
126
IX The Relativistic World
163
Quantum Theory
181
XI The Reality of Mathematical Physics
197
XII Why Does Mathematics Work?
210
XIII Mathematics and Natures Behavior
228
Bibliography
246
Index
255
Copyright

VIII A Prelude to the Theory of Relativity
148

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About the author (1985)

Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut on September 20, 1928. He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1951. His first collection of poetry, Exiles and Marriages, was published in 1955. His other collections included Without, The Museum of Clear Ideas, and The Painted Bed. He received several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The One Day, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Happy Man, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1953 to 1962 and was the United States poet laureate for 2006-2007. He was also a memoirist, an essayist, and the author of textbooks and children's books. His memoirs were entitled Life Work and Unpacking the Boxes. His children's book, Ox-Cart Man illustrated by Barbara Cooney, won the Caldecott Medal. He received a National Medal of Arts in 2011. He died on June 23, 2018 at the age of 89.

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