Poetry for Young People: Wallace Stevens - Classic Poems for Kids & Teens | Perfect for Homeschooling, Bedtime Stories & Classroom Reading

Without the many, the kindly and the paternal years of John Serio in charge at the dual-controls of the vehicle that is now The Wallace Stevens Journal, now firmly being driven into the ground by Bart Eeckhout, the work of the most difficult and inscrutable poet of them all, would perhaps have been sidelined. If Philip Larkin's advice had been followed as driving instructor, au fait as he is with light pornography and the ways of the Lambretta, we would have remained unprepared for the beauties of the open road and the long run with Wallace Stevens; and the big and heavy rolling man might have been confined to the shadows.This exquisite book, in its large child-size and in all of its colourful glory, is dedicated to John Serio's children, Alisa, Alexis and Andrew; and the sensitive illustrator Robert Gant Steele likewise prays for his son Tyler ("May you always see poetry in everyday things").The idea that children might be groomed to accept the icy advances of Wallace Stevens could only have come from a kindly and a paedophile heart; from a man who loves his children and wants the best for them. I wish my surname was Serio, and that the divine nine year old boy, rapt with a book, illustrated over pages 46 and 47, had been me (The House was Quiet and the World was Calm). I learned to love books by going down to the sea and the sky again and again, with Enid Blyton alone; and over and over, while the words were new. There were no books like this in England for me, when I was nine. I recall my reading material; being silent upon a peak in Darien for the first time, looking upon the back of my first tea card in a new series from Brooke Bond called "British Wild Life"; and reading on the back in blue about the palmate newt, number 50. In those days, when Eliot was kept away from the young, I think I would have been killed off by the mean and willful obscurities of Wallace Stevens. Perhaps this exquisite book will lead young girls and boys a little earlier into temptation."The Emperor of Ice Cream" is one of the most shocking poems in the world; on its surface a disgusting portrayal of a poor and dead woman. There is a suggestion that her Emperor-like nakedness, but for her horny feet, is to be covered in a white cloth that she herself, when alive, had embroidered with fan tails. It is as shocking as Hans Christian Andersen's fable of The Emperor himself who was spotted naked "as the day that he was born" by a child. We must learn to be as children to discern the truth; and not to mind it. The poem is included in the book presumably because children like ice-cream; but don't we all? Appearance was everything to Wallace Stevens. With his arcane sense of humour he would have appreciated how ludicrous he might look, as a particularly large adult in a vast bespoke suit, holding an ice-cream cone. See the Queen of England with an ice-cream cone! The greater pretender, Mrs Thatcher herself; now that she is dead today; and, but for her feet, covered over with the blue livery of The Ritz, would have been better remembered if we had seen her just once with an ice cream. Instead, the old harridan suggested that we, the British, should "Rejoice" at our sinking The Belgrano. How crisp a new cone; and how "horny" that cornucopia always is. In that strange poem which John Serio points out here as one of the poet's favourites, ("an instance of letting myself go") an unpretentious young man approaching "wenches in such dress as they are used to wear", would not look out of place, in the name of Love, holding beautiful flowers in a cone made of last months' news. How vain her old news, now that Thatcher is dead. How vain the news of the future, when Queen Elizabeth's time has finally come; how vain our fictive covering unless we are innocents or know what we are wearing. Can these lessons be learned by a child? That the only emperors worth the name, risk it all melting; puckering their mouths for ice cream and laughing in the faces of preposterous fame? Stevens' difficult didactic line "Let be be finale of seem" is paraphrased for children as "Let what is be the end of something not real or not true." Which is as far from ice-cream as it is possible to get.The violence of fairy tales is aimed at children; as we all assume. Fairy tales preserve for us Hansel and Gretel, wicked stepmothers, the nakedness of our Emperor (and of our storyteller); Little Red Riding Hood, wolves dressed up as sweet old ladies and The Ugly Duckling.Stevens, literally larger than life, is the heavy roller of cigars and bombast who announces like a master of ceremonies that we should "let be" but should always prefer what is sweet to what is clearly nasty or past it. But to make life into a fairy tale, it is hard to resist mentioning the horny feet of Thatcher in her coffin as the cortege winds its way down the white and ice-creamy Whitehall.I'm not sure if John Serio, after all those years can see The Emperor of Ice Cream as I see him. I imagine Wally looking at the pattern around the rim of his horny ice cream cone, the fantail crenellations, the individuation of lettering raised upon the biscuit; and words came to him like cornucopia and horns, toenails and cornets; and he laughed; just as a child might, to see Wallace Stevens in his nightshirt or his underpants. The binding and the dust jacket reproduce the dreamy landscape in the everglades of Florida that illustrates Stevens' "The load of sugar cane". The "load" of sugar-cane is as sweet as ice-cream.