A.A. Milne’s Poetic World of Childhood in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

The chapter is a discussion of the construction of A.A. Milne’s poetic world of childhood in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. To date there has not been an analytical consideration which focuses specifically on the poetry in the approach taken here. For example, Kenneth Sterck’s ‘The real Christopher Robin: an appreciation of A. A, Milne's children's verse’ (Children’s Literature in Education, Volume 11, Number 2 / June, 1980, 52-61) relates incidents from Milne’s autobiography to the poetry. The intention here is to move away from this approach and consider the particular characteristics of the construction of childhood portrayed through the poems. Areas discussed are:
• ‘Reality’
• Social Behaviour
• Expectations
• Moral Viewpoint
• Play
• Fantasy
• The Self
• Psychological veracity
• Language
• Images
• Irony
The chapter links the areas outlined above, and then situates the discussion within consideration of the movement from Romanticism to Modernism, and the slow disintegration of the idyllic image of the pastoral world of childhood.