ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this subsequent chapter of this book. The book explores the literature of childhood through a variety of texts, both those conceived and written for children. Its focus is those works that provide a shared area where adult and child come together. The poetics of childhood addresses the persistent longing for childhood in adulthood and those states of mind we connect with childhood: openness and a sense of mystery and awe, as they are imaginatively expressed in the language and literature of childhood. Through language, the adult can recapture in part what can never fully be reclaimed, what has been twice removed, leaving two empty chambers: in one, the negative space of the first great loss, the body of the mother; in the other-what comes with the growing consciousness and socialization of the child-the loss of the immediacy of a primal response to the natural world.
