juvenilia

/ˈd͡ʒuːvɪˈniːljə/

Etymology

From Latin iuvenīlia, neuter plural of iuvenīlis (“of or pertaining to youth”).

Why this word is great

JUVENILIA — [Noun] Works produced during an artist's or author's youth. From Latin iuvenīlia, neuter plural of iuvenīlis ("of or pertaining to youth"). Unlike "oeuvre" (which encompasses an artist's lifetime of work) or "apprenticeship works" (which suggest deliberate training), juvenilia are raw, unpolished artifacts of early passion. It is the teenage poet's overwrought sonnet scribbled in a notebook, the painter's first awkward portrait of a sibling, or the composer's tentative melody played on an out-of-tune piano—each a fossil of potential, preserved before time and craft refined it into something else entirely. The ache of juvenilia is the ache of all beginnings: the knowledge that what comes later may be better, but never again so unselfconsciously alive.

noun

Works produced during an artist's or author's youth.“...rhyme was not his [Milton's] talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest in his "Juvenilia" or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced,...”