'To Find Sweet Her Chilly Common Sense'

I borrowed from the library The New Yorker Book of Verse (1935) for two reasons: 1.) a lingering sense of loyalty to a magazine that I haven’t read much in the last thirty years or so but that once published several of my favorite writers (A.J. Liebling, Louise Bogan, Rebecca West); 2.) an enduring interest in light verse, which I assumed would be well represented in an anthology made up of poems from the magazine’s first ten years. Earlier this year, in an essay on light verse published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote of the poet R.S. “Sam” Gwynn:

“He notes that The New Yorker was the country’s leading venue for light verse until the 1960s, when the magazine began to disavow it in favor of more self-consciously `serious’ poetry. `It’s a shame the sophisticated humor in its cartoons can no longer be found in its poetry, which is fairly dreary and has been for years,’ Gwynn says.”

The anthology proves heavy with poems by such once-prominent practitioners of light verse as Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Morris Bishop and E.B. White. All carry on poetically as though Ezra Pound had never left Idaho. Most of the poems are metrically regular and rhymes abound. None is incoherent. All were published in a magazine whose founding editor, Harold Ross, prided himself on the sophistication of its contents which he said were “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” Here is Parker’s “For R.C.B.”, published in the Jan. 7, 1928 issue. I assume the initials refer to Robert Charles Benchley, her friend and fellow-New Yorker contributor:

“Life comes a-hurrying,

Or life lags slow;

But you’ve stopped worrying—

Let it go!

Some call it gloomy,

Some call it jake;

They’re very little to me—

Let them eat cake!

Some find it fair,

Some think it hooey,

Many people care;

But we don’t, do we?”

The tone embodies the sprightly, raffish cynicism Ross worked hard to sustain. I’ve always liked this use of the American slang word jake, defined by the OED as “excellent, admirable, fine, ‘O.K.’” The anthology, however, contains another sort of poem, something richer and more substantial. Consider Phyllis McGinley’s “November,” which first appeared in the Nov. 2, 1934 issue of The New Yorker:

“Away with vanity of Man.

Now comes to visit here

The maiden aunt, the Puritan,

The spinster of the year.

“She likes a world that’s furnished plain,

A sky that’s clean and bare,

And garments eminently sane

For her consistent wear.

“Let others deck them as they please

In frill and furbelow.

She scorns alike the fripperies

Of flowers and of snow.

“Her very speech is shrewd and slight,

With innuendoes done;

And all of her is hard, thin light

Or shadow sharp as sun.

“Indifferent to the drifting leaf,

And innocent of guile,

She scarcely knows there dwells a brief

Enchantment in her smile.

“So love her with a sparing love.

That is her private fashion,

Who fears the August ardor of

A demonstrated passion.

“Yet love her somewhat. It is meet,

And for our own defense,

After October to find sweet

Her chilly common sense.”