Hollander on Robert Louis Stevenson

Hollander's reflection on Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses is an exercise in finding the stars reflected in the bucket of his poetry.

Hollander writes of spooky experiences where, upon returning to Stevenson's collection of children's verses, he finds echoes of things that he's written 20 or more years after having read those verses as a child. Once again, he uses his personal reflections on poetry to underline his point from the first chapter of The Work of Poetry that the best poetry and the greatest poets work diachronically.

But is it effective?

In a blog, I think it would be effective to use personal reflection in this way, but in a published academic work, such a personal reflection seems strange to me. Poetry is a very subjective thing, indeed, but it's also something that should have some universal quality to it as well; it has some element that resonates with everyone.

However, I find nothing to relate to in this chapter. I never read A Child's Garden of Verses (as far as I remember - I suppose that means I've another book to add to my reading list) and find myself in the minority of the students that he's taught who, by his own admission (on page 139), have been more familiar with Stevenson's children's poetry than with the King James Version of the Bible.

What really piqued my interest in this chapter, though, was Hollander's distinguishing between a novel and a romance (in the sense of "a fantastical story," I imagine). Unfortunately, at least in this chapter, he leaves this unexplained.