Childhood and Modernity: Dark Themes in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry for Children

Carol Ann Duffy’s three volumes of children’s poetry are important and interesting because they emerge from the work of a writer whose adult poetry has persistently associated childhood with dark and difficult areas of experience. This article explores what happens to such challenging material when a poet of major significance changes the focus of her work to address child readers directly. Since these areas of experience are bound up with issues that have made the meaning of childhood particularly problematic within contemporary society, Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry may be read as an oblique commentary on the condition of childhood within late modernity. The author focuses on strategies used by the poet in representing both romantic love and disturbing emotions for a child readership, assessing the roles played by distancing and estrangement devices in mediating such experience.