Exploring Literature

The Magical Power of Poetry

Children are born ready to love language. Children experience language and are instantly smitten by the sounds words make: the shape and feel of words as they are expelled from our mouths, sometimes softly, (like “puh”), sometimes explosively (like the “ck” sound). Children are creatures of sensation that love the rhythm of sounds and the feeling of words. 

Poetry, like music, is good for children. Good poetry for children may be funny, sly, silly, or heartbreaking, and it often points to larger realities. It promotes new ways of seeing and hearing, making the ordinary extraordinary, and the extraordinary comprehensible. On the page, poetry calls attention to the form and display of words. For young children, poetry helps establish phonemic awareness — the understanding that words are made up sounds.

Poetry read aloud has a special magic that bonds together the speaker and the listener. Our first poems and nursery rhymes, induct children into the human family. In all likelihood, the earliest nursery rhymes were replete with mayhem and murder, crime and corruption, marriage and political satire, love and hope.

As children move through the stages of literacy, poetry helps children use words to express feelings and ideas, coming to understand written and spoken language as a choice of words and how they fit together. As Mark Twain put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and lightening bug.”

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