“Almost entirely absent from elementary school curriculums, rarely chosen as bedtime reading by parents, poetry — formerly a joyful accouterment of youth, an inexhaustible gift — seems forgotten. Yet poetry and children belong together. And who, among the great American poets, could be more appropriate for childhood than Emily Dickinson?” reads a book review written by Honors College Professor Ellen Handler Spitz published May 9 in The New York Times. 

In her article in the Sunday Book Review titled “That Amherst Belle,” Spitz reviews two new children’s books: Eileen Spinelli’s “Another Day as Emily,” illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff, and Burleigh Mutén’s “Miss Emily,” illustrated by Matt Phelan. She notes the two books “strive to create, by very different means and with different results, a sense of the poet Emily Dickinson as a person.”

Spitz writes the two books do a good job of introducing readers to Dickinson’s “eccentric persona,” but an opportunity is lost because none of Dickinson’s poems is printed in full in either book.

Ellen Handler Spitz has written frequently about children’s literature for The New Republic and is author of “Illuminating Childhood.” To read the full book review in The New York Times, click here.