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MileChai All Hebrew Dr Seuss' Books and
Now in
Yiddish
Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel in
Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904.
After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford
University, he began a career in advertising.
His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick,
Henry, the Flit!, appeared in several leading
American magazines. Dr. Seuss's first
children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On
Mulberry Street, hit the market in 1937, and
the world of children's literature was changed
forever! In 1957, Seuss's The Cat in the Hat
became the prototype for one of Random House's
best- selling series, Beginner Books. This
popular series combined engaging stories with
outrageous illustrations and playful sounds to
teach basic reading skills. Brilliant,
playful, and always respectful of children,
Dr. Seuss charmed his way into the
consciousness of four generations of
youngsters and parents. In the process, he
helped kids learn to read.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and three
Academy Awards, Seuss was the author and
illustrator of 44 children's books, some of
which have been made into audiocassettes,
animated television specials, and videos for
children of all ages. Even after his death in
1991, Dr. Seuss continues to be the
best-selling author of children's books in the
world.
Read more
Dr. Seuss's meters
Dr. Seuss wrote most of his books in a verse
form that in the terminology of metrics would be characterized as anapestic
tetrameter, a meter employed also by Lord Byron and other poets of the
English literary canon. (It is also the meter of the famous Christmas poem A
Visit From St. Nicholas.) Abstractly, anapestic tetrameter consists of four
rhythmic units (anapests), each composed of two weak beats followed by one
strong, schematized below:
x x X x x X x x X x x X
Often, the first weak syllable is omitted, or an additional weak syllable is
added at the end. A typical line (the first line of If I Ran the Circus) is:
In ALL the whole TOWN the most WONderful SPOT
Seuss generally maintained this meter quite
strictly, up to late in his career, when he was no longer able to maintain
strict rhythm in all lines. The consistency of his meter was one of his
hallmarks; the many imitators and parodists of Seuss are often unable to
write in strict anapestic tetrameter, or unaware that they should, and thus
sound clumsy in comparison with the original.
Seuss also wrote verse in trochaic tetrameter, an arrangement of four units
each with a strong followed by a weak beat:
X x X x X x X x
An example is the title (and first line) of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish,
Blue Fish. The formula for trochaic meter permits the final weak position in
the line to be omitted, which facilitates the construction of rhymes.
Seuss generally maintained trochaic meter only for brief passages, and for
longer stretches typically mixed it with iambic tetrameter:
x X x X x X x X
which is easier to write. Thus, for example, the magicians in Bartholemew
and the Oobleck make their first appearance chanting in trochees (thus
resembling the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth):
Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff
then switch to iambs for the oobleck spell:
Go make the oobleck tumble down
On every street, in every town!
In Green Eggs and Ham, Sam-I-Am generally speaks in trochees, and the
exasperated character he proselytizes replies in iambs.
While most of Seuss's books are either uniformly anapestic or
iambic-trochaic, a few mix triple and double rhythms. Thus, for instance,
Happy Birthday to You is generally written in anapestic tetrameter, but
breaks into iambo-trochaic meter for the "Dr. Derring's singing herrings"
and "Who-Bubs" episodes. |
