As a very small child I would read Mother Goose rhymes, almost daily. Winnie the Pooh lived in my bookshelf and the Hundred Acre Wood (aka Ashdown forest) in my vivid imagination..... I had the original version of Winnie the Pooh mind you, the one illustrated by E.H. Shepard,
not the Disney version of my son's generation. I still have my books, Now We are Six, When We Were Very Young and so on (although I am not fortunate enough to have hard copy first edition prints; mine are frayed, well loved, paperbacks), you can find the list at the Wikipedia link here; but I digress.
My reading progressed over the years, so that by the age of thirteen, my mother gifted me a "Complete works of Shakespeare" for my birthday... yes, my joy was unconfined :D I remember walking down the passage in the old house and waltzing around the front room and kitchen quoting Shakespeare and using Shakespearian language, much the amusement and/or irriation of all. I suppose acting might have been a fair choice of career for me were I not so horribly scared of standing in front of people, as I discovered when I played Charles Dickens in our school house play one year (yes, it was an all girls school - - not some butch fantasy), but that is another story...
So, back to poetry...
I won't profess to be able to quote poetry verbatim nor have a vast knowledge of poets themselves, but my love for it has never diminished over the years, only the time I have to spend reading it seems to have dwindled.. Dylan Thomas, T.S.Eliot, Walter de la Mare are a few whose works can be found on my bookshelves.
I never put much thought to it as a child but I loved the imagery poetry created. The pleasure those images gave me within the secrecy of my mind, it was my own version of reality, a place I where I would spend most of my time.
I was never one for faery tales or dolls; but poetry, insects and stuffed animals were my faery tales. My world was filled with Beatrix Potter like creatures due, in large part, to the stories and songs told and sung to me by my maternal grandmother (who, by some strange co-incidence, had the married name of Potter). Her stories, sadly none of which I can recall, led me into an Eden of childish dreams. And though in later life we grew distant and animosity darkened our relationship, my childish self remembers with a great deal of love and joy the moments I shared with her and how her propensity for drawing out the imagination in me is hugely responsible for forming the creative side of nature.
To this day, when I am at a loss for inspiration, I often revert to reading poetry or stories which evoke an emotional response to a subject, thing, creature or person. My music collection is eclectic and I will listen to whatever it is which feeds that emotion in order to draw on the fragment of my personality from whence my creation is emanating at any given time. The source is never the same, each piece of art or work I do represents a tiny piece of my soul.
Were it not for poetry being my first love and for my grandmothers devotion to me as a child, I often wonder if the realm of creativity which lives within me would ever have been discovered, nurtured and come, in turn, to be so deeply loved by myself and if not; what would be in its place I wonder?!
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