SOURCE: MacDonald, Ruth K. “The Poet's Place.” In Shel Silverstein, pp. 116-32. New York: Twayne, 1997.

In the following essay, MacDonald discusses Silverstein's status as an author of poetry for children and evaluates the poems collected in his volume Falling Up.

Poetry has long been one of the great unexplored areas in children's literature. Few reputations, of either poets or critics, have been built on it, since most acclaim and notice goes to novels. What criticism exists for poetry derives in many cases from the “beauties” school of criticism—pointing out the poetry's beauties, such as a poet's or a line's excellence, without any particular explanation of wherein the beauty lies. The reasons for this neglect of children's poetry are twofold: first, except for the most simple rhymes, the American population has a general distaste for poetry, a result of the second reason, the unfortunate way in which poetry...