author
Hilda Conkling
1910–1986
A remarkable child poet, she created her best-known work before she was old enough to write it down herself. Her brief, vivid poems about nature still feel fresh and surprising.
1 Audiobook
Poems By a Little Girl
by Hilda Conkling
About the author
Born in New York state in 1910, Hilda Conkling was an American poet remembered for an extraordinary burst of childhood creativity. She grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her mother, poet and Smith College professor Grace Hazard Conkling, encouraged her imagination and wrote down the poems Hilda spoke aloud.
Conkling composed the work she is known for between about ages four and fourteen. Those poems were published in three early collections: Poems by a Little Girl (1920), Shoes of the Wind (1922), and Silverhorn (1924). Readers were drawn to the freshness of her voice and the way she turned flowers, birds, moonlight, and seasons into something dreamlike but clear.
Although her published poetic career was brief, her reputation lasted. She is often remembered as one of America’s most notable child poets, and her work still appears in anthologies and literary reference pages devoted to early 20th-century poetry.