Children’s poet a prolific anthologist
Lee Bennett Hopkins, who dedicated a lifetime to writing and anthologizing poetry for children, amassing troves of verse to help young people navigate the unknowns of life — from why stink bugs stink to how to survive a divorce — died Aug. 8 at a hospital in Cape Coral, Florida. He was 81.
The cause was complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his husband, Charles Egita.
Hopkins was widely considered an authority of children’s poetry, a genre that he cultivated for decades as a teacher, writer and anthologist. He held the Guinness World Record for “most prolific anthologist of poetry for children,” with 113 titles to his name when the record was declared in 2011. By the time of his death, the count had risen past 120.
But before Hopkins was a creator and collector of children’s literature, he was a child himself — one in dire need of the emotional sustenance that can be found in books and particularly, he believed, in books of verse. Poetry, he remarked in Instructor magazine, “should come to (children) as naturally as breathing, for nothing — no thing — can ring and rage through hearts and minds as does this genre of literature.”
While growing up in the projects of Newark, N.J., Hopkins recalled, he was “out of school more than (he) was in” as he helped raise a younger sister while their single mother worked. He wrote in a biographical sketch that he was uninterested in “anything but survival” until a teacher introduced him to the marvels of literature and theatre.
“She turned my life around,” he told the News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla. “She saw something in me I didn’t know existed.”
Inspired by her, Hopkins became a teacher. His experiences in the classroom, including teaching poor black and Hispanic children in Harlem during the racial tumult of the 1960s, exposed gaps in the canon of children’s literature that he later sought to fill as an anthologist.
When Langston Hughes died in 1967, Hopkins hurried to the library in search of a collection of Hughes’s works to show the students. The only children’s title he could find was The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, a 1932 volume illustrated with artwork Hopkins described as “minstrelesque.” Aghast, he could not bring himself to show it to his students.
The next day, he said, he called the Knopf publishing house and persuaded a children’s editor of the need for a new collection of Hughes’s poetry for young readers. And so was born Don’t You Turn Back: Poems by Langston Hughes (1969).
His goal seemed to be to write and collect poems for any question that might arise in the life of a child.
“Children can find poetry about any topic today, as they can in children’s literature today. It’s a very diverse field, and it’s out there for children who need it.”