I still remember Whitman's "When lilac's last in the dooryard bloomed" because my great-grandmother recited it long before I could read; I learned to read with Dr. Seuss's McElligot's Pool; my favorite volume in the Children's Classic series was poetry, and my favorite poem in it was Vachel Lindsay's "The Ghosts of the Buffaloes." I started making poems myself in high school, partly because of a wonderful Spanish teacher (Susan Dunlap), partly because of a terrible English teacher (no name necessary), and partly because I got involved in a church theater production of Archibald MacLeish's JB. But the first book of poems that absolutely blew me away was Ted Hughes's Crow. For years I bought everything of his, including the 1976 book of children's poetry, Moon-Whales. It's a very curious book about how ordinary things here are on the moon transformed into mysteries, sometimes sinister and dangerous. Here is "Foxgloves":
Foxgloves on the moon keep to dark caves,
They come out at the dark of the moon only and in waves
Swarm through the moon-towns and wherever there's a chink
Slip into the houses and spill all the money, clink-clink,
And crumple the notes and rearrange the silver dishes,
And dip hands into the goldfish bowls and stir the goldfishes,
And thumb the edges of mirrors, and touch the sleepers
Then at once vanish into the far distance with a wild
laugh leaving the house smelling faintly of
Virginia creepers.
I've done the linebreaks exactly as in my 1st edition copy, though I think it's clear from the rhyme that the last three are really but one long line, indented because it won't fit on the page. It's hard for me to imagine these rhymed couplets having been written without Dr. Seuss — the foxgloves are The Cat in the Hat (1957) complete with bothered goldfish but without his sense of play or his recursive helpers, and with only a suggestion of Seuss's jaunty meter.
But the book is even more curious than I had at first realized. While searching for a topic in a graduate course in bibliography I came across this in the July 27 1963 New Yorker (p. 28):
Foxgloves on the
moon keep
to dark
caves, they come
out at the dark of
the moon only and, in
waves, swarm
through the
moon-towns and,
wherever
there's a chink, slip
into the houses and
spill all
the money, clink-
clink, and crumple the
notes and
rearrange the silver
dishes and dip
hands
into the gold-
fish bowls and stir
the gold-
fishes and thumb
the
edges
of mirrors and
touch
the sleepers
and
instantly
vanish
into
the far
distance with a wild
laugh
leaving
the house
smelling faintly
of Virginia
creepers
It's The New Yorker, so commas appear more regularly, but only one word changed in 13 years: The New Yorker's "instantly" became Moon-Whales's "at once." Oh, and the layout is different, and as a result all of the rhymes except the last, sleepers/creepers, are completely buried, and whatever vestige of meter there is in the children's poem is missing here. Lest you suspect that maybe, just maybe, years later, Hughes realized he had some buried rhymes in semiregular lines and decided to excavate them for a children's book, you should know that on August 27 1963 The New Yorker printed a similarly handled version of "Music on the Moon," another set of rhyming couplets from Moon-Whales. Sylvia Plath was five months dead when "Foxgloves" came out, and Hughes was raising their children alone. The children's versions came first, despite not having been published until 13 years later.
I still love Crow, and Gaudete, and The Hawk in the Rain. I think it's possible that Hughes will be remembered as a major poet of the last century. But I'm more than a little puzzled how two fairly decent poems for children ended up as extremely bad period-pieces in The New Yorker. Who did the editing, and why? Was it a cynical (and successful) effort by Hughes to 'put one over'? Did he or some editor think it would be difficult to publish rhyming poetry? Plath sometimes worked on Hughes's manuscripts: given the lead time for publication, is it possible that she did it? Would it have been at all possible, in the immediate aftermath of her suicide, to publish these as children's poems anywhere? I don't have any answers.
I've read Moon-Whales to my own children and to others'. They preferred Seuss (and not because Hughes is scary), but now that the kids have grown, I've kept only the Hughes. Maybe it's because my discovery occasioned one of my first insights into politics, craft, and craft-failure in poetry.
I took that bibliography course and wrote the paper for Dr. Robert Miller at the University of Louisville more than 20 years ago. I'm writing this now because I just received my The Complete New Yorker, 8 searchable DVDs with all half-a-million pages of the first 80 years of The New Yorker, from February 21 1925 to February 21 2005. I was born on The New Yorker's 28th birthday.
12:27:22 PM 
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