Marjorie L. Hourd

I am re-reading Marjorie Hourd's The Education of the Poetic Spirit published in 1949. She is said to be one of the founders of the creative writing movement. I'm interested in the ways adults read children's poetry - the nature of their responses and the distinction to be made from these responses and those of a teacher.

At one point in the book Hourd writes: 'I do not think that we need to teach children how to write poetry; and all children are not poets in words. Some use paint or movement or music with more success. But many more of them are poets then we think, and our job as teachers is to leave the way open' (p.83) Hourd believed that the 'same aesthetic laws apply to child and adult writing' (p.73) and she does not shy away from a full and honest critique of the poems that she offers that children have produced, berating signs of what Ruskin called 'composing legalism' in the work.