The Poetry of Your Teenage Years

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I think it's nice to give your kids poetry because they're more likely to take it with them. Kipling is a very good example I think so my understanding is he would literally listen to folk music in his head and sort of tap on his table as he wrote. The poems that you loved as a child because your parents read them to you tend to stay around unlike the music part. Let's talk about the original be a 1500 year old poem called bail, bail wolf by Sir Walter Scott.

Tolkien read it as a tale about mortality. The poet David Whyte said it was a metaphor for the psychological demons deep in our minds. And that, insists the cartoonist and writer Zach Weinersmith, is precisely Beowulf's appeal: Its richness opens the door to endless interpretation. Listen as the author of Bea Wolf, a graphic novel for children based on the Old English poem, speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poetry in general, Beowulf in particular, whether we should require students to memorize poems, and the value of stories for children even without a moral lesson.