Children and Poetry, by Andrew Motion

When I was a child growing up in the late 1950s and '60s, everything I heard about poetry made it sound either as weird as clog-dancing, or as difficult as arithmetic, or both. We had five books of poems at home (I counted them), and they were either my parents' unread school prizes (Francis Thompson and Rupert Brooke), or a leather-bound survivor from my great-grandfather's shelves (Tennyson). The only two that had been bought for pleasure were Wavell's anthology Other Men's Flowers, and Betjeman's Summoned by Bells - bestsellers my mother kept by her bedside, which I never saw her actually read. At school, poems were lines we had to learn - either for learning's own sake, or as punishments. I never met another child whose experience was any different.

Things have changed a lot since then. The curriculum encourages a wider range of reading, teaching has become generally more sprightly, learning by rote has fallen out of fashion (though I wish more learning by heart had taken its place), and many writers visit schools to prove, among other valuable lessons, that not all good writers are dead writers. Predictably enough, this has encouraged a greater general interest in poetry: sales have improved, public readings are commonplace, prizes abound, and examples of new and old work appear regularly in newspapers, on the radio, even in the Underground. It amounts to a quiet revolution, and we are all the beneficiaries.

Or that's how it appears, anyway. But when I visit schools, and talk to teachers as well as pupils, it's evident things are not so rosy. Poetry, I'm often told, is 'boring', or 'irrelevant', or 'too difficult', or (for a lot of boys) 'girlie'. Why? The explanation probably has something to do with practical things: teaching methods, the choice of texts, the comparatively small amount of time allowed for 'creative' work in classrooms. It may be that poets themselves are to blame, or the alluring mass of other entertainments available to children. But whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the majority of people still feel poetry is 'not for them', in a way that few people would feel fiction isn't, or film, or the theatre.

My own feeling is that something essential to poetry has too often been forgotten or veiled. It is essentially a very primitive thing - the sign of a basic human wish to make things that are beautiful, true, interesting and memorable, and which in the finest examples of its manifold forms will not just please, console and stimulate us, but will survive when the poet him or herself is long gone. Children themselves are the proof of this. Whether they realise it or not, their most likely first experience of poetry is in the playground, chanting - delighting in rhythm and rhyme for its own sake, discovering how memory enjoys like-sounds, and finding how the clear sight of familiar things, let alone their rearrangement, can lead to wonder.

This is the bucket-load of magical qualities that has to be carried un-spilled into the classroom, and of course it's a difficult transition. As children begin to learn the mechanics of poetry, as the pressure of exams grows, as the language of appreciation becomes more informed, so poetry's primitive nature becomes threatened. And when these difficulties are combined - as they inevitably are - with a generally unsympathetic, or actually hostile zeitgeist, they can easily become overwhelming.

That's why we need to keep thinking about how best to promote and protect poetry within the walls of a school. But it's also why we can reasonably believe that children who feel poetry is 'not for them' are not expressing a deep truth, but parroting learned behaviour, or responding to their particular circumstances, or showing they never had the chance to feel that poetry even might be for them.

Everyone who cares about education, as well as poetry itself, must want to fight for this larger choice. And by 'everyone' I don't just mean teachers and figures in government, but parents, librarians, and all other interested parties. Their combined efforts can give children permission to find out about poetry for themselves. It can prove that what pleases children about their own playground chants is well-equipped to survive the acquisition of more adult knowledge, and become a means of deepening their sense of the world - at the same time as it deepens their sense of themselves and others round them.

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate and a Patron of the Children's Poetry Bookshelf