Poet
Shel Silverstein
American poet · 1930–1999
Shel Silverstein never planned to write for children — he was a cartoonist for Playboy and a hit songwriter (he wrote Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue") until the legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom talked him into it. The result was The Giving Tree (1964) and two of the best-selling poetry collections ever printed: Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) and A Light in the Attic (1981).
His scratchy pen-and-ink drawings and gleefully subversive verses — kids eaten by boa constrictors, fake stomachaches itemized in detail, garbage piled to the sky — treat children as co-conspirators rather than pupils. That respect is why his books get read to pieces.
Everything remains firmly under copyright, so we offer his classics in two-line tastes with the analysis they deserve.
Shel Silverstein's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Where the Sidewalk Ends1974
There is a place where the sidewalk endsAnd before the street begins,
The title poem of his most famous collection imagines a borderland just past the pavement where the grass grows soft and white — childhood imagination mapped as actual geography. Crucially, it's the children who know the way and the adults who must be led there. Few poems state a book's whole philosophy so completely in its first two lines.
Read the full poem →Sick1974
"I cannot go to school today,"Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
Peggy Ann McKay itemizes an escalating catalog of imaginary ailments — measles, mumps, a shrunken brain, an 'instamatic flu' — in perfect galloping rhyme, until she learns it's Saturday and is instantly cured. It is the definitive poem of the faked sick day, and a masterclass in the comic reveal. Teachers report it is the poem kids most often memorize voluntarily.
Read the full poem →Messy Room
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
The speaker inventories a catastrophe of underwear on lamps and raincoats on chairs with mounting indignation — then discovers, in the last lines, that the room is his own. It's a perfect little machine of dramatic irony that children get instantly and parents quote strategically. The joke works because the outrage is so sincere right up to the collapse.
Read the full poem →Hug O' War1974
I will not play at tug o' war.I'd rather play at hug o' war,
A pun becomes a worldview: replace the game with winners and losers with one where 'everyone giggles' and everyone wins. It is Silverstein at his gentlest, which is why it appears on classroom walls and in wedding programs alike. The simplicity is deceptive — it's a complete ethics in eight short lines.
Read the full poem →Invitation1974
If you are a dreamer, come in,
The opening poem of Where the Sidewalk Ends works as a doorman's welcome: dreamers, wishers, liars, hope-ers, and pretenders are all invited to sit by the fire and hear 'flax-golden tales.' By welcoming 'liars' alongside dreamers, Silverstein signals that storytelling itself is the honored guest. Librarians have used it as a motto for fifty years.
Read the full poem →Smart1974
My dad gave me one dollar bill'Cause I'm his smartest son,
A boy proudly trades his dollar for two quarters, the quarters for three dimes, and on down to five pennies — because more coins must mean more money. The poem never breaks character to explain the joke, trusting young readers to do the math and feel deliciously smarter than the narrator. Math teachers have been assigning it ever since.
Read the full poem →