No apology is offered for giving large space to myths,
legends, fairy stories, tales of all sorts, and to poetry; for in
these expressions of the creative mind is to be found the material on
which the imagination has fed in every age and which is, for the most
part, conspicuously absent from our educational programmes.
America has at present greater facility in producing "smart" men than
in producing able men; the alert, quick-witted, money-maker abounds,
but the men who live with ideas, who care for the principles
of things, and who make life rich in resource and interest are
comparatively few. America needs poetry more than it needs industrial
training; though the two ought never to be separated. The time to
awaken the imagination, which is the creative faculty, is early
childhood; and the most accessible material for this education is the
literature which the race created in its childhood. The creative man,
whether in the arts or in practical affairs, in poetry, in engineering
or in business, is always the man of imagination.
In this library for young people the attempt has been made not only
to give the child what it needs but in the form which is most easily
understood.
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