From Sea to Shining Sea

Title:  From Sea to Shining Sea

Author: Complied by Amy L. Cohn

Illustrator: Numerous Illustrators: Molly Bang et al.

Publisher:  Scholastic Inc. New York

Genre: Poetry

Level: Upper

Number of Pages: 399

Pub. Date: 1993

Summary:  This book is a collection of 140 folktales, songs, poems, and essays features the words of Mark Twain, Virginia Hamilton, Walt Whitman, Stephen Foster, and Woody Guthrie that pays tribute to American folklore. The sections include literature, poems and songs about the Underground Railroad, Slavery, Pioneers, American classics, Baseball, ghost stories and dreamers. It also includes notes about each story and it’s background at the end of the book along with other resources for finding more folklore. It includes a glossary of terms, information about the author and an author, title and subject index.

Critique: This book is so abundant in poems that it includes many elements of poetry it would be hard to identity all of them. Several of the poems include rhyme, like the poem on page 314 called “Casey at the Bat,” with the first two lines being an example:

“ The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day’

The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.”

There is also a lot of imagery in this collection of poems, like this one on page 229 called ‘Twas Midnight which has interesting opposing ideas in the imagery to create a unique setting:

“’Twas midnight on the ocean,

Not a streetcar was in sight;

The sun was shining brightly,

For it rained all day that night…”

Response: I learned something new in this book from one of the poems called Steamboats on the

Mississippi: Sounding Calls. Back when steamboats were a popular method of transportation they had to find the depth of the water by using giant lead pipes attached to rope. The poem was really interesting to me and I learned something new that I’d never even thought about before.