Shel Silverstein - The Greatest Poet

I grew up reading Shel Silverstein's collections of poems. We all know and love The Giving Tree, but that's not why I love to read Shel Silverstein. It's his brilliant and hilarious collection of poems that I have read at least 3 times over. He has made 4 (at least I think) books of funny poems. They are (in order from the first published to last) Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light In The Attic, Falling Up, and the only collection of poems to be published after he died, Every Thing On It. I never got the chance to see him, as he died in 1999, but he has always been one of my favorite authors.

If you don't like poems and don't want to read Shel Silverstein's, then you probably think of poems as long, boring, and hard to read paragraphs that say something about the meaning of life. If that was the actual definition of a poem, Shel Silverstein's poems would not be poems. They are hilarious and clever (almost all rhyme) and to top it off, they have hilarious pictures to go along with it. You sometimes can't even predict what will happen at the end. I even think of them as really short stories, because they don't just read as a poem, they really tell you something about a certain character and/or idea like a book would. To give you an idea what his poems are like (and to give a good reason why I am so obsessed with these poems) here is one of my favorite poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends...

The Land Of Happy

Have you been to The Land of Happy,

Where everyone's happy all day,

Where they joke and they sing

Of the happiest things,

And everything's jolly and gay?

There's no one unhappy in Happy,

There's laughter and smiles galore.

I have been to the land of happy-

What a bore!

This is why I love Shel Silverstein's poems. They are funny, but they still make you think, like, well it would be boring if everyone was happy and it was the same every day. Most of his poems are about this size, though some take over 3 pages! The poems can be a little nasty are sad, but, then again, those happen to be my favorite poems of all. The best thing about his poems are that while younger kids can read then, all ages can enjoy them. There must be a thousand poems in the four books he made. What is really amazing was his ability to write and draw well. His wacky sense of drawing perfectly matches his also wacky poems. His poems are the things that really made me love to read and write.

While his poems are the reason why he is one of my favorite authors, he has also made some amazing books. The only book that I have read from him, other than his collections of poems is The Giving Tree, but the book is so well written I know his other books are good. Just a few are, The Missing Piece, Runny Babbit, and Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book (The last one's for adults). Because I like Shel Silverstein so much, I have decided that he is my favorite author of 2017, and I will update my website to replace my favorite author of 2016, (Stuart Gibbs) with Shel Silverstein on my home page. I hope that you enjoy Shel Silverstein as much as I do and enjoy the amazing collection of poems he has written. :)