"If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling." -- Harold Bloom
Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages is a delightful
anthology selected by
Harold Bloom of both classics by beloved childrens' authors as well as works by writers well known for other great literary classics. All of the works are challenging, whether in prosaic style, verse, themes, or content. The works cover
birth,
life, and
death;
nature and the
seasons;
sadness,
love, and
hilarity;
reflections,
morality, and
spirituality;
mystery,
adventure, and
fantasy.
But none of the selections are
obscure, or ponderously long (the longest is about 20 pages, while most are just a few), or inappropriate for children (e.g. no
surrealism or nothing that dwells on the
existentialist dilemma, even if these would make for good reading for adults).
Organized by season, the volume includes works by: - John Keats,
- William Shakespeare,
- Aesop,
- G. K. Chesterton,
- Rudyard Kipling,
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
- Stephen Crane,
- Walt Whitman,
- Edward Lear,
- Robert Louis Stevenson,
- Lewis Carroll,
- Emile Zola,
- John Ruskin,
- Ben Jonson,
- Oscar Wilde,
- Mark Twain,
- The Grimm Brothers,
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
- Nathaniel Hawthorne,
- Christina Rosetti,
- Thomas Hardy,
- Leo Tolstoy,
- Alfred Lord Tennyson,
- Lord Byron,
- Hans Christian Andersen,
- Charles Dickens,
- O. Henry,
- Guy de Maupassant,
- William Blake,
- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
- Herman Melville,
- John Dryden,
- Percy Bysshe Shelley,
- Edgar Allan Poe,
- Alexander Pushkin,
- Edith Wharton,
- H. G. Wells,
- Nikolai Gogol,
- Ivan Turgenev, and many others, including many by
- "Anonymous."
I highly recommend this book to children and adults! You can always get it from a library and read a few pages.
The Floating Old Man by Edward Lear
There was an Old Man in a boat,
Who said, "I'm afloat! I'm afloat!"
When they said, "No! you ain't!" he was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.