ABSTRACT
Childhood has been privileged as an ideal state since Romanticism (Natov, passim), or (to stress the validity of a meta-discursive approach here) one might say, the privileging of childhood as ideal has been going on ever since childhood was invented (Ariès, passim). There is a close relationship between Romantic ideas of nature and the natural state of humankind and the idea of childhood innocence. The “state” here is of course not the nation state. Nor, by any means, are privilege and rule the same thing; further, one notes that whatever privileges we consider here are almost entirely extended by adults. It is worth clarifying then that this chapter is, like others in this book, devoted to the production of culture by adults. This chapter explores the relationship between the idea of poetry and what it makes possible and the idea of childhood and its possibilities. How far can we travel with this kind of nexus? A grand aim would be to understand how poetic texts have reflected and shaped the creation/evolution of childhood as a social construct, and, conversely, to understand how the idea of the child’s way of seeing has shaped a sense of what poetry can or should be-especially through such notions as “recovered innocence” and defamiliarization/deautomatization. In this chapter, I content myself with some preliminary explorations of the kind that might enable such a reciprocal investigation of two Romantic ideas that remain so important in contemporary thought.
