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When we publish cheaply illustrated books of children's poetry full of bad rhymes or sticky-sweetness or flat prose rhythms we call "free verse," we express a secret contempt for the form. We tell the child, in so many words: You see? It really doesn't matter -- let's just shovel it in.

Whatever the art form being presented to children it must be vibrant, skillful, mysterious, thrilling. The child absorbs a work of art as adults seldom do -- takes it in, I mean, with her whole being. Images from childhood form the adult's vision. We remember in the deep secret places of the psyche the "great green room" of Margaret Wise Brown's "Goodnight Moon," or Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," or William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say," or Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat." The language of childhood is our purest language -- it may be the last truly shared cultural language we have. We must not debase it -- least of all in our poetry.