ABSTRACT |
Best
known for her children’s books, Nancy Willard is a remarkably good poet
in the tradition of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. This paper
explores the devices she uses in her poetry to achieve the freshness and
purity of her work for children. The disarming innocence of her
questions and the alarmingly simple answers she proposes help build a
sort of fairytale parallel reality that too often results more appealing
than the one we live in. Her sources of inspiration are often the absurd
situations we daily take for granted, and which she defamiliarizes in
order to expose our loss of touch with that primeval world of childhood.
I will highlight the resemblances between her poetry and that of Bishop,
and point to pictorial influences in their work. At the formal level the
resemblance is also remarkable, as both poets favor minor forms and free
verse, with the notable exception of those rhymed forms demanded by
children.
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