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Hist Whist and Other Poems for Children
Twenty poems deal with ghosts and goblins, birds, animals, flowers, winter, and Christmas
- GenresPoetryPicture Books
45 pages, Hardcover
First published November 17, 1983
15 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
370 books3,958 followersEdward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 12, 2019
Most of these don't seem to be particularly aimed at children in the same way that Cummings' Fairy Tales obviously are. On the other hand there's a high proportion of really good poems here. A high proportion of only 20 in this slender volume, which appears to contain 4 poems not in Collected Poems. That justified the purchase to me, with my completist tendencies towards writers I greatly admire.
September 21, 2015
I am intrigued by e. e. cummings unique style. It is important that children read many types of poetry, not just the standard rhyming poems.
This collection of 20 poems touches on nature, faith, Christmas, creatures, and the a cautionary poem, inspired by Halloween.
Calsada's black and white illustrations offer interpretations of cummings' poems.
This collection of 20 poems touches on nature, faith, Christmas, creatures, and the a cautionary poem, inspired by Halloween.
Calsada's black and white illustrations offer interpretations of cummings' poems.
October 27, 2020
I was excited to read this book, but I just could not get into the style in which it was written. Maybe I will give it another chance sometime in the future.
January 19, 2021
Popsugar 2021: A genre hybrid.
March 10, 2013
1 general anthology of poems
Cummings, E E, David Calsada, and George J. Firmage. Hist Whist, and Other Poems for Children. New York: Liveright, 1983. Print. 45 p.
E.E. Cummings, great American poet, has written a collection of poems for children. His signature style is easily identified, which will be new for children to encounter. The parenthesis, capitalization, and word placements may confuse young minds. When read aloud, listeners will be delighted with the imagery within the twenty poems collected in this volume. Seasonal and holiday scenes are accompanied by detailed, life-like line drawings by Calsada. Older children will better understand the meanings and nuances in the collection, although young children may appreciate the rhythm of the poems and onomatopoeia usage. To better visualize the poem, and take a more active role in listening, a 'poetry basket' will be developed using a selected poem from the collection. The instructor will provide small, handheld props which match the objects/characters in the poem. For this example, “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May” is used. The basket will hold items to represent each of the four characters as well as shells, starfish, a crab, and a stone. Children act out the scene as it is read aloud.
My favorite lines/poem:
who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from home high
window; at the gold
of november sunset
(and of feeling:that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
Cummings, E E, David Calsada, and George J. Firmage. Hist Whist, and Other Poems for Children. New York: Liveright, 1983. Print. 45 p.
E.E. Cummings, great American poet, has written a collection of poems for children. His signature style is easily identified, which will be new for children to encounter. The parenthesis, capitalization, and word placements may confuse young minds. When read aloud, listeners will be delighted with the imagery within the twenty poems collected in this volume. Seasonal and holiday scenes are accompanied by detailed, life-like line drawings by Calsada. Older children will better understand the meanings and nuances in the collection, although young children may appreciate the rhythm of the poems and onomatopoeia usage. To better visualize the poem, and take a more active role in listening, a 'poetry basket' will be developed using a selected poem from the collection. The instructor will provide small, handheld props which match the objects/characters in the poem. For this example, “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May” is used. The basket will hold items to represent each of the four characters as well as shells, starfish, a crab, and a stone. Children act out the scene as it is read aloud.
My favorite lines/poem:
who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from home high
window; at the gold
of november sunset
(and of feeling:that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
November 30, 2014
I was excited to discover that there was a book of poems that ee cummings had written for children. But alas, this was not entirely true. Instead, this is a collection of 20 of his poems that could be said to have been written for children because the subject matter is animals or nature or other "appropriate" things. And of course each poem has an illustration paired with it (by David Calsada in this particular edition from 1983). Yet for its simple approach to "children's poetry," it is still ee cummings and at times hard to decipher. It is no simple child that would read this collection on a rainy day.
Despite these set backs, however, I did find some new favorites. The poem "maggie and milly and molly and may" is a poem at its base about the ocean. And yet by its end, ee cummings has widened the perspective up to the whole world. I am astonished by his simple turn of phrase:
"may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone."
Beautiful. And there are illustrations too that will remain in my memory. Calsada's picture to illustrate "why did you go" would appeal to any child and art lover alike. It captures the earthiness and surrealist qualities of ee cumming's poetry quite well.
Despite these set backs, however, I did find some new favorites. The poem "maggie and milly and molly and may" is a poem at its base about the ocean. And yet by its end, ee cummings has widened the perspective up to the whole world. I am astonished by his simple turn of phrase:
"may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone."
Beautiful. And there are illustrations too that will remain in my memory. Calsada's picture to illustrate "why did you go" would appeal to any child and art lover alike. It captures the earthiness and surrealist qualities of ee cumming's poetry quite well.
October 27, 2009
E.E. Cummings is one of my favorite poets. These poems are about nature and the seasons. I love the detailed, black and white (pen and ink?)illustrations by David Calsada. To me, these poems are very expressive and are fun to try to read aloud. Some swirl with movement, like the snow in #18: "blossoming are people/nimbler than Really/go whirling into gaily/white thousands return/by millions and dreaming/drift hundreds come swimming/(Each a keener secret/than silence ever tells)..." Others are quiet and reflective, like a day by the sea described and summed up in #4:"may came home with a smooth round stone/as small as a world and as large as alone/For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)/it's always ourselves we find in the sea". To me, there is something light and irreverent yet also profound in these poems.
November 19, 2008
just can't get better than this.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews