Nostalgia for Childhood & Its Importance to Adult Identity: A Creative Poetry Project

Presenter: Anna Tomlinson (English)

Mentor: Danny Anderson

Facilitator: Matt Nelson

As psychologists suggest, the process of nostalgia provides exploration of self and continuity of identity. This project investigates how nostalgia for childhood, and particularly remembrances that address the line between innocence and adulthood, remain in society’s consciousness and play an important part in individuals’ identity. Our modern conception of childhood and nostalgia arose in the nineteenth century when the industrial revolution halved infant mortality and children became increasingly valued as individuals. Around 1800, William Wordsworth wrote his foundational poetry that longs for childhood as a time of lost innocence and connection to the divine. The twentieth century poets Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Hudgins continue this exploration of childhood, memory, and nostalgia, building upon and rebelling against Wordsworth’s foundation. Like Wordsworth, Heaney finds childhood wonder in natural landscapes, but also addresses decay and loss of innocence. Justice returns to nostalgia that longs to find belonging in memories but realizes this impossibility. Bishop details childhood confusion and fear when confronting adult realities. Hecht represents memory as nightmarish, as a darkness the speaker can never quite forget. And finally, Hudgins portrays childhood as a vulnerable, humiliating time and longs for adulthood and its allowances of power and pleasure. My own poems strive to enter these poets’ conversation about how childhood memory figures in adult life.