David McCord ranks among the handful of top twentieth-century poets for children. Critics have said shining things about him, awards have showered down on him, and his poems are often anthologized. These poems embody a curiosity about the world which echoes with sounds to please and tickle the young and which shows a lightness in relation to a subject which plays games with and yet simultaneously keeps a distance from the reader. McCord conducted a crusade to reach children with poems and through that medium to wake them to the pleasures and satisfactions of observation, word play, and sound.

David Thompson Watson McCord was born in New York City on 15 November 1897 and spent his earliest years in the East: on Long Island and in Princeton, New Jersey, with summers in the Poconos. The only child of Joseph Alexander and Eleanore Baynton Reed McCord, when he was twelve financial...