Posted on November 21st, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Writers, Editing.
I'm trying to find Dr Seuss texts on the web, and am finding dribs and drabs, but nothing close to comprehensive.
The Wikipedia page is one of those peculiar Wikipedia combinations of helpful and lame. For example, after a fine several-paragraph discussion of Seuss's meter, concluding:
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.
Wikipedia then adds:
Dr. seuss also inspired other authors to write in his story way and taught kids many things like reading.
Thud! Wikipedia also notes Seuss's consistently progressive and Democratic-party politics, and says this about his attitude toward Communism:
His early political cartoons show a passionate opposition to fascism, and he urged Americans to oppose it, both before and after the entry of the United States into World War II. (By contrast, his cartoons tended to regard the fear of communism as overstated, finding the greater threat in the Dies Committee and those who threatened to cut America's "life line" to Stalin and Soviet Russia, the ones carrying "our war load".)
But then someone else (presumably) say this:
Interestingly enough [a phrase that has no business in encyclopedia writing], there is some thought that Seuss's Imagery, especially that of The Cat in the Hat was a metaphor for "sweeping out" communism and cleaning out the "red".
Sure.
I did not know, by the way, that his name is properly pronounced "Soyce" -- that is, it's the way he pronounced it -- but since his parents were German and it's his own middle name, it makes sense.
0 comments.
Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are appreciated but not required (emails aren't displayed).