Today J. Patrick Lewis was named the national Children's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. He's the third to hold the two-year post, following Jack Prelutsky and Mary Ann Hoberman.

If you read contemporary children’s poetry with some knowledge of the grand tradition from which it flows, only tone deafness can keep you from hearing echoes of the past: the lambent lines of worthies like Christina Rossetti, Langston Hughes, and Robert Louis Stevenson in gentle poems, or the inspired wordplay of David McCord and John Ciardi in nonsense verse. . . .

My own benefactors range from Eliot himself, Auden, Housman, Lear, Carroll, the Carryls—Charles and Guy, père and fils—to many other lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century toilers in poetry, nonsense, and light verse. I happily confess my felonies. When poets stand on the shoulders of their forebears, they should do so with a lightness, not to say airiness, that bespeaks respect for the tradition and an unimpeachable commitment to originality.