Theodore Geisel: The Unknown Poet (Dr. Seuss)

Essay by stoney0515High School, 12th gradeA+, April 2004

download word file, 9 pages 4.7

Downloaded 85 times

The name Theodore Geisel, though one of the most famous contemporary writers, is rarely recognized even though his work is well known throughout the world. He has won three Academy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for his work but people only recognize him by his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss.

Some people may say that his work is not poetry, but poetry is defined as "writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm." (Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary). Theodore Geisel is in-fact a poet and he had an interesting way of getting there.

Theodore Geisel has not always been the beloved poet of the children that he is now. He made his first appearance in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904 when he was born to Robert Geisel and Henrietta Seuss Geisel. As a child, Theodore Geisel enjoyed drawing and he kept that love throughout his life.

At Dartmouth College, he drew cartoons and wrote humorous articles for the campus magazine, Jack-O-Lantern. He later went to Oxford College to get his doctorate in English literature only because he had told his father that he was going on a Campbell Fellowship. Although he had applied, he had not received the fellowship, but his father got excited and told the newspaper that Theodore Geisel had received the fellowship. When he didn't receive the award, his father decided that since the entire community thought that Theodore Geisel was going to Oxford on a Campbell Fellowship, he must go to save face. (Robinson Feb. 16, 2002)

Besides majoring in English, he also studied the psychology of advertising and in his zoology and botany classes, he would entertain himself by rearranging the Latin names of plants and animals, which...