5 Children’s Books That Illustrate Classic Poems

Poetry helps kids develop emotional awareness, language skills, and a love for great literature. These classic books are a perfect place to start.

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The benefits of introducing children to poetry at a young age include opening the door to the world of great literature, teaching them about emotion, and advancing language development. But how can parents get started?

Fortunately, a lot of resources are available to parents and teachers, including a significant number of children’s picture books that illustrate great, classic poems. Within the pages of these books, children encounter beauty in language and images, with illustrations that spark children’s imagination as they consider the word-magic of the poems.

Here’s a list of five excellent children’s books to help your child set sail on the vast and beautiful sea of classic literature. As Emily Dickinson put it:

“There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry.”

You can find this complete poem and many more in the Dickinson book listed below.

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrated by Tasha Tudor

Some of my earliest exposure to poetry was from this book. Containing a collection of short poems specifically written for children by the adventure novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, this volume wonderfully intermingles the simple joys of childhood and everyday life with the world of the imagination and the distant magical lands it conjures. Poems include “The Swing,” “The Moon,” “Farewell to the Farm,” “The Land of Nod,” “At the Sea-Side,” and “Whole Duty of Children.”

Renowned illustrator Tasha Tudor’s artistic skill rivals Stevenson’s ability to capture the beauty of childhood and childhood dreaming. Her exquisite and highly detailed pictures, with their nostalgic feel and gentle colors, evoke the world of childhood.

Because of its strong moral lessons and celebration of the simple, this book is the perfect introduction to poetry for very young children. It should adorn the shelves of every family library.

‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost, Illustrated by P.J. Lynch

Instead of illustrating a collection of poems, this book depicts just one. Like Stevenson’s work, Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” is simple, easy for children to understand—although still full of mystery and layers of meaning. The regular meter, rhyme scheme, and concrete imagery will appeal to children, while some of the meditative, melancholic lines may speak to adults:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep But I have promises to keep And miles to go before I sleep”.

There are multiple illustrated versions of the poem, but the one by P.J. Lynch is probably the best. The gorgeous, detailed paintings do an outstanding job of emphasizing the haunting beauty of the lonely, nighttime winter landscapes.

‘Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson,’ Edited by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin, Illustrated by Chi Chung

Like Frost, Dickinson didn’t write specifically for children. Yet many of her nearly 1,800 poems are suitable for children. Frances Schoonmaker Bolin collected many of them in “Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson.” Chi Chung’s illustrations contain simple, clean lines and vivid colors.

Dickinson had an extraordinary ability to reveal common things in a new light and make the reader consider them in unexpected ways. Bolin says in the introduction: “[Dickinson] wrote about hope, as well as flowers, birds, people, life, and death—ordinary things. But she had such a vivid imagination that she seemed to get inside these things and look at them in a new way.”

This unusual perspective and Dickinson’s creative use of syntax, vocabulary, and punctuation will make her poems a delight for young readers. This edition defines some of the more obscure words to facilitate reading and grow children’s vocabularies.

‘The Brook’ by Alfred Tennyson, Illustrated by Charles Micucci

The text for this book is a group of verses from a longer poem of the same name, originally published in 1855 as part of Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud, and Other Poems.” Tennyson makes deft use of a tripping, tumbling rhythm to give the poem energy and mimic the running and gurgling of a stream:

“I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.”

Children will enjoy the alliterative sounds, bursting with vigor: “I bubble into eddying bays,/I babble on the pebbles.”

Most children naturally find wordplay, rhythm, and rhyme delightful; it’s an unfortunate indictment of our educational system that many of them come to misunderstand or dislike these poetic devices by the time they graduate high school. This is all the more reason to deepen children’s love of poetry from a young age. It shows them that it’s something exciting, alive, and enjoyable.

The illustrations by Charles Micucci in this book certainly help with that. They’re effusive and detail-packed. They tell a visual story alongside the poem. Over the course of the book, a father and his daughter explore the brook together. As the seasons pass, they grow older together and eventually meet a young boy.

When the girl and boy grow up, they fall in love, marry, and bring their own children to the same lovely stream with all the plant and animal life blooming around it.

‘The Children’s Treasury of Classic Poetry,’ Compiled by Nicola Baxter, Illustrated by Cathie Shuttleworth

Another anthology, this book, unlike “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” includes a range of poems not originally written for children but still suitable for young readers. Some of the finest poets of the English language are represented here, including William Shakespeare, William Blake, Tennyson, Dickinson, Sir Walter Scott, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe. Animal and nature poems fill out this volume, as well as adventurous poems such as “O Captain! My Captain!” and “Eldorado.”

Although not of quite the same quality as some of the other illustrations on this list, Cathie Shuttleworth’s pictures do a good job enlivening the poems and making them leap from the page. All in all, it’s a good choice for parents or teachers who want to expose their children and students to a wider range of poetry.

There are many more great poetic children’s books gracing the shelves of bookstores, including others illustrated by Tasha Tudor, but these five provide a good starting point. Don’t settle for books or poems that talk down to children or that are low-quality because children “won’t know the difference.” As educator Charlotte Mason taught, we ought to give our children the best intellectual food we can—in an age-appropriate manner—so their minds and hearts can grow, mature, and deepen. These books will help accomplish that.