Masks

Shel Silverstein was a cartoonist, illustrator, musician, songwriter, playwright, and writer. He authored several acclaimed, best-selling children’s books, including The Giving Tree (1964) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974). “Masks” is a poem from Every Thing On It (2011), published after Silverstein died in 1999. The volume contains poems that Silverstein didn’t publish while he was alive. Silverstein’s family members selected the poems for the volume, reading the approximately 1,500 unpublished Silverstein poems and sorting them into nos, yeses, and maybes for publication.

Like much of Silverstein’s work for children, “Masks” doesn’t hide the unsettling aspects of life. The poem confronts complex themes like personal identity, loneliness, and melancholy. Although Silverstein regularly criticized children’s literature, his work is not dissimilar from A. A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, and other canonized children’s authors who didn’t talk down to their young readers. While “Masks” isn’t Silverstein’s most famous poem, it’s not ignored by critics and readers, either.

Poet Biography

Shel Silverstein was born in Chicago on September 25, 1930. His dad, Nathan, and uncle, Jack, opened a bakery a few years before the Great Depression. Like many who lived during this era, the Silverstein family faced hard times: “Most days, the Silverstein family ate whatever Nathan could bring home from the bakery,” writes Lisa Rogak in her biography A Boy Named Shel (2007).