Dr. Seuss is Tottally a Poet!

Dear Kira,

In response to your question, while it certainly is fun to make fun of adolescences for obvious reasons, I think we need to be very careful about turning tragedy in comedy. I mean, tragedies, true tragedys any way, are tragedies for a reason. My personal, too-lazy-to-go-to-Dictionary.com, definition to tragedy is something that has a profound and negative impact on the life of any one person or any group of people. For example, while there are some parts of adolescences that no one can talk about with a straight face, the number of teenage suicides rises every year. My general rule of thumb is that, if it's a serious issue to someone, you probably shouldn't be joking about it.

Now, to a pressing issue that has been bothering me for some time. So, as you know, I'm taking a poetry class this semester (I'm on the strugglebus) and, on the first day of class, the professor asked us our favorite poets. One girl said that her favorite poet was Dr. Seuss and his response that was Dr. Seuss is not a poet.

Now, I'm with you that reading Dr. Seuss isn't quite the same thing as reading Shakespeare but, come on, he purveys some pretty profound messages if you bother to look for them. Like, for example

Yertle the Turtle is Mean!

, did you know that Yertle the Turtle is actually about Hitler? Did you know that the line from Horton Hears a Who, "a person's a person, no matter how small", is actually in reference to the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan? Did you know that there are only 50 different words used in Green Eggs and Ham? I could go on.

My point is, that Dr. Seuss is just as worthy of the title of poet as Frost or Whitman. So my question to you becomes, why are only "serious" poets considered worth reading? It seems to me that writing of all kinds is full of arbitrary designations of genre and what is and is not "sophisticated" or "worthwhile" writing. It doesn't seem fair to me that, just because Seuss wrote for children he is considered less of a write.What makes a poet and, does the literary genius of Dr. Seuss fit into that category?

Maria