These days when children, if not blasting one another with shotguns in schoolyards, are glued to the television where every type of adult entertainment is available to them, it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate between adult literature and literature written specifically for or directed to children. With children treated almost everywhere as adults, how can one have an anthology like this one that proclaims itself a “collection of ‘children’s verse?’” That term, the editor Neil Philip immediately recognizes, covers a multitude of sins. “I have taken it to mean,” he writes,

verse written for children, or with them prominently in mind, or published for them with the explicit endorsement of the author… . The problem is essentially one of definition. What is children’s poetry, and how does it differ from poetry in general? This anthology is itself a full answer to this difficult question, but it is not an easy answer to summarize.

Some may argue that “the very notion of poetry for children is nonsense… . There is only poetry, good or bad.” Yet there is a “recognizable tradition that is at once separate from and intermingled with a larger poetic tradition, but it has its own landmarks and its own rhetoric,” and it is this tradition, from its beginning in the eighteenth century down to the present, that this book attempts to trace.

For many, this tradition, after Blake, Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Christina Rossetti, reached its peak in a lost