Lee Bennett Hopkins, who in scores of anthologies he edited as well as in his own writings used poetry as a tool to teach and fire the imaginations of young readers, died on Thursday Aug. 8 in Cape Coral, Fla. He was 81 .

His husband, Charles Egita, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mr. Hopkins was famed in the children’s book world for championing poetry as well as for the sheer volume of his output. Beginning in the late 1960s he published more than 100 anthologies over a half-century.

There were volumes on particular subjects, about animals, space, inventions, art, punctuation, the different people youngsters were likely to encounter when they began attending school. He drew on writers known mostly within the children’s literature universe and on household names like Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings.

Image With his 2012 anthology “Nasty Bugs,” Mr. Hopkins solicited new poems from established writers, and even included his own “Ode to a Dead Mosquito.”

And he wrote poetry himself, often slipping one of his works into the anthologies he edited. For instance, his “Nasty Bugs,” a 2012 anthology illustrated by Will Terry, included his own “Ode to a Dead Mosquito”:

You of little brain

didn’t you know

I felt your sting

the instant you

began to drain?

Other books were entirely his poetry, including “City I Love” (2009; illustrated by Marcellus Hall). Among the most ambitious of these was “Been to Yesterdays” (1995), a series of no-nonsense poems about his early childhood that covered difficult subjects like divorce:

When

Daddy

left us,

he left his

bedroom slippers

beneath the sink

on the bathroom floor.

When

Mama put them

in the giveaway bag

for the poor,

I knew

this time

Daddy

had gone

out the door

for good.