Margaret Wise Brown and the Art of Paying Attention
In her books for children, Brown used poetic soundscapes and surprising metaphors to expand our ideas of what it means to be human.
“A book can make a child laugh or feel clear-and-happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end. It can jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar, lift him for a few minutes from his own problems of shoelaces that won’t tie and busy parents and mysterious clock-time, into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story. If I’ve been lucky, I hope I have written a book simple enough to come near to that timeless world.”—Margaret Wise Brown
Read the acclaimed children’s author Margaret Wise Brown enough times, and you’ll start to notice themes, or maybe preoccupations is a better word for them—the night, rabbits, dogs, celery, sunrise, the moon—these are just a few of her enthusiasms. As a writer and poet, Brown was uniquely adept at paying attention to the things of the world but also to our inner worlds, our sensations. The sonic texture of her words awakens the senses, bringing awareness to abstract thoughts and feelings. Her poetry opens up small moments, creating space for expansion—suddenly, the reader sees, hears, and feels things with more depth and perplexity. She notices the “blue nights with a foggy moon, smoking in the trees” and pauses to remember “the ticklish sneezing smell of a hot daisy.” Her gift was finding constellations of surprise in ordinary, everyday moments.1
The poet Jane Hirshfield wrote that poetry “takes place in the border realm where inner and outer, actual and possible, experienced and imaginable, heard and silent, meet. The gift of poetry is that its seeing is not our usual seeing, its hearing is not our usual hearing, its knowing is not our usual knowing, and its will is not our usual will. In a poem, everything travels both inward and outward.”2 Brown’s poetry exists in the border realm; it straddles the edge of perception, where our conscious and unconscious thoughts swirl together, like in a dream. It shines a bright light on beauty while digging it up with a pitchfork. This is also the job of children. The philosopher William James described the world of children as “buzzing and blooming confusion.” They inhabit the strange in-between space of knowing and not knowing, paying close attention to wonder—dissecting it under a microscope. They are experimental observers searching for answers, which is why they’re such natural poets.
“Here is the playful audience of James Joyce and Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein, the audience of Virginia Woolf and Swinburne and the King James version of the Bible. Translate their playfulness and serious use of the sheer elements of language into the terms and understandings of a five-year-old and you have as intelligent an audience in rhythm and sound as the maddest poet’s heart could desire.”
—Margaret Wise Brown, “Writing for Five-Year-Olds” (1939)
For children, reading is a bodily experience. They read with their senses, whereas adults read with their eyes. They respond to the rhythm and sound of words. In Brown’s essay, “Writing for Five-Year-Olds,” she writes that the pleasure of reading for children is in the melodious rhythms of the spoken word. “It is a distinct form of prose writing, more rhythmical in its pounding, flowing lines than the words that are written for the eye.” But it’s not just about sound; content is also important. Children’s literature should have a close connection between rhythm and content. It should meet children where they are in development and experience. It should include their delights and interests, the things they pay attention to.
Children are intuitively skilled at paying attention—which was also Brown’s superpower. As a child, she spent most of her time outdoors chasing butterflies, cloudwatching, and adventuring through the nearby forest. Imagining young Margaret meandering through grassy meadows, quietly gazing at the miraculousness of a daisy, makes her seem twee, like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Brown was a wildly curious dreamer, but sometimes she could be more like the Queen of Hearts—with a fiery, capricious personality prone to mischief and temper tantrums. Other times, she was more like the erratic, eccentric, and exasperating Mad Hatter. But Brown needs no comparison; she was wonderfully unusual and unapologetically herself.
Growing up, Brown was exposed to a variety of books, everything from fairy tales to National Geographic. Her hunger for knowledge was voracious. She kept records of her findings in her childhood diary, fusing lines of poetry and songs with daily observations of the weather and the moon’s phases. She also read books out loud to her younger sister Roberta, rewriting the story as she went along—adding surprising twists and turns to keep her listener rapt. These early textual experiments were foundational to the imaginative writing Brown would become known for.
In the early ‘30s, after graduating from college with an English degree, Brown began writing short stories, but she struggled to develop traditional plots. Frustrated and disheartened, she moved to Manhattan, where she enrolled at Bank Street, a progressive college for student teachers. She quickly discovered she wasn’t a great teacher, but her mentor, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, recognized Brown’s Mad Hatter poetic genius and encouraged her to try writing for children. Mitchell believed that children’s stories should include something familiar, something they recognize—and that children respond more to the sounds of words than they do their meanings. For them, words reflect the immersive world of the sensory realm: the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings—the Here and Now of their everyday surroundings. She felt children’s stories should look and sound like the lived experiences of childhood, not a romanticized version by jaded adults. This idea directly opposed children’s literature at the time, which was mainly fairy tales, myths, nursery rhymes, and moralistic fables. Brown was attracted to Mitchell’s unusual approach but never fully endorsed it; she was too original to be tied down to one doctrine. Instead, she combined the Here and Now with poetic language and traditional storytelling techniques, creating something entirely her own.
Brown’s understanding of the Here and Now was more nuanced than Mitchell’s. She saw it as an imaginative experience—a constellation of sensations, feelings, and thoughts children synthesize through creative play. It’s part reality and part fantasy, swirling in a hazy blur. And she was determined to create stories that emulated this ever-shifting kaleidoscope view of the world.
She approached writing like a science experiment, constantly tweaking her formula. One of her first picture books, Bumble Bugs and Elephants (1938), illustrated by the modernist artist Clement Hurd, resulted from trial and error. There is no plot; instead, it starts like a traditional fairy tale with “once upon a time” and then unexpectedly lists a series of large and small creatures living alongside one another in a rich, colorful world familiar to children. There are gardens, butterflies, tugboats, and a dining room. There’s also a simple, repetitive pattern to the text—after a few pages, children know what to expect. But then Brown and Hurd throw another curveball with a blank spread and the question, “What do you know that is great big?” Turn the page, and another blank spread asks, “What do you know that is tiny little?” Suddenly, the story opens up, inviting the reader to step in and write their own ending. This surprising technique became a defining characteristic of many of Brown’s books.