“I have, in
general, avoided ‘light verse’ or vers de
société, and I have made no attempt to find suitable extracts from the
longer poems of Chaucer, Skelton, Marvell, Dryden, Pope [!], Byron [!] and
Browning. Among long poems that are exclusively, continuously and irresistibly
funny, Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark
[!] is unique, and rather than chop
it into mincemeat I have omitted it altogether.”
The author
of this credo is Michael Roberts (1902-1948), who published The Faber Book of Comic Verse in 1942,
not a notably funny year. Based on his selections, it’s fair to conclude that
Roberts was a man unburdened with a sense of humor. Of course, he was once a
member of that well-known comedy troupe, the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Only one criterion counts when it comes to comic verse: amusement, ranging from
a nod of the head to moist, helpless laughter. The real test, of course, is
whether the poet can get a laugh when the reader is alone, without an audience.
The social component in laughter is strong. Solitary, non-pathological laughter
is rare. Nothing in Roberts’ anthology evoked it in me.
In his New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978),
Kingsley Amis said, “Anon. is not my favorite poet.” He may be Roberts’. He
devotes space to “In the Dumps”:
“We’re
all in the dumps,
For
diamonds are trumps;
The kittens
are gone to St. Paul’s!
The
babies are bit,
The
Moon’s in a fit,
And the
houses are built without walls.”
In other
words, sub-Lear nonsense. Amis described Lear’s work as “whimsical to the point
of discomfort.” The writer of comic verse must resist two primary and opposed temptations
if he seriously hopes to make people laugh. On one side, the black hole of
didacticism, the irresistible tug of gravity in the form of a “message.” On the
other, nonsense, the cute counterpart to so-called Language poetry. By
succumbing repeatedly to both, Roberts ends up with unrelieved dreariness. One
of his miscalculations is to ignore vers
de société, which Amis defines like this: “a kind of realistic verse that
is close to some of the interests of the novel: men and women among their
fellows, seen as members of a group or a class in a way that emphasizes
manners, social forms, amusements, fashion (from millinery to philosophy), topicality,
even gossip, all these treated in a bright, perspicuous style.”
Some readers
might nominate E.B. White, who remains an idol to some, though I find him in
prose and poetry insufferable. I think of White as the founder of the
Sensitivity School of American Writing – resolutely unfunny, always
self-regarding, out to make sure you like him. Roberts includes White’s “Commuters”:
“Commuter—one
who spends his life
In riding to
and from his wife;
A man who
shaves and takes a train
And then
rides back to shave again.”
Inadvertently, Roberts includes a few good poems which, if not always laughter-provoking,
are able to stand on their own merits. Here is an untitled poem by Samuel
Johnson, written as a swipe at Thomas Warton’s poetry, that serves as a comment
on Roberts’ anthology:
“Wheresoe’er
I turn my view,
All is
strange, yet nothing new:
Endless
labour all along,
Endless
labour to be wrong;
Phrase that
Time has flung away;
Uncouth
words in disarray:
Trick’d in
antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and
elegy, and sonnet.”
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