The Wind in the Willows
In this respect, The Wind in the Willows operates the way a long prose poem might, with elements introduced, then later developed and deepened—a fitting suggestion given that Rat is a poet and that one of the book’s ongoing concerns is Mole’s initiation into the world of the imagination and art through his experiences with Rat and the river. Though he admits early in the book that he is “no poet himself ” (p. 20), Mole speaks in similes after his vision of Pan, comparing “the wind playing in the reeds” to “far-away music” (p. 91 ) . He understands the compensatory, therapeutic role of poetry in Rat’s life, and offers him pencil, paper, and solitude in the wake of the seafaring rat’s departure.
That Grahame connected poetry with landscape is evident in his preface to The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, first published in 1916. There he describes “the whole range of English poetry” as a “wide domain, with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walled and scented gardens here and there” (p. xiii). Grahame’s knowledge of the Romantic poets, with their attention to landscape as the site of imaginative experience, squared with his own love of the countryside. He poured all of his affection for nature, his love and knowledge of literature, and his longing for an ideal world into The Wind in the Willows. We can still respond to the world he created, even in the twenty-first century—or especially now.
Grahame’s contribution to children’s literature is immense. The very element that critics did not understand when The Wind in the Willows was published has made it a classic. Grahame created the first novel-length animal fantasy, the roots of which reached back to Aesop’s fables, gained energy from Beatrix Potter’s contemporaneous tales about Peter Rabbit, and blossomed into a mature, new form, foreshadowing later permutations like Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Adams’s Watership Down, and White’s Charlotte’s Web.