Publisher's Synopsis
This book brings together the most notable verse that has been written for children over the past five hundred years. Based on a fresh examination of the sources of children's literature, the book contains more than three hundred poems by well over a hundred named authors (a fifth of them American) arranged chronologically, from Chaucer and Lydgate to T. S. Eliot and Ogden Nash. The volume thus offers a conspectus of verse-writing for children in the English language; and the notes on the authors, at the end of the volume, which form almost a directory to those who have written the best verse for the young, deal in particular with the background to the poems given here.;This book is intended for parents, lovers of poetry, children.