'They Take Me Back to Happy Days'

Merle Johnson confidently titled his bibliography of American poetry You Know These Lines! and reinforced it with his subtitle, [T]he Most Quoted Verses in American Poetry. That was in 1935. In his preface, written entirely in the second person, Johnson explains his title: 

“It means that you, with the usual American upbringing, will know these lines from American Poetry, when you hear or read them. They are not chosen primarily as masterpieces of literature. They may not be considered their authors’ best by all critics. It is not indicated here that you should remember them for the sake of their artistry, power or other great qualities, though many are truly fine. They are the lines you do remember.”

 

Johnson’s claim holds up pretty well, even for a reader born almost two decades after he was writing. From grade school to high school we read a lot of poetry, most of it American, and were expected to memorize some of it. Johnson includes no complete poems, only the best-known lines – the stuff we remember. Of the eighty or so verses he includes I’m familiar with perhaps a third, often only in fragments. They represent many of American Poetry’s Greatest Hits: “Annabel Lee,” “The Arrow and the Song” (“I shot an arrow into the air, / It fell to earth, I knew not where”), “Barbara Frietchie” (“‘Who touches a hair of yon gray head / Dies like a dog! March on!’” he said.”), “Casey at the Bat,” “Home” (“It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home”).

 

One measure of poetry, good and otherwise, is memorability, a quality enhanced by the rhythmic nature of poetic language. That’s why some of our heads are stuffed with Johnny Mercer and Bob Dylan lyrics alongside lines by Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. To ask the obvious question: How much verse written since 1935 have we committed to memory? In my case, very little American poetry – scraps of Berryman, Cunningham, Karl Shapiro, Hecht. Among English poets, some Auden and Larkin. One of the pleasures of having memorized poems is reciting them, internally or aloud, while walking. No doubt some reader out there is able to do that with lines by Ashbery or Ginsberg. I’ve never thought it worth the effort.

 

An unexpected pleasure included in Johnson’s book is the three-page foreword by H.L. Mencken, who naturally uses the opportunity to unload on the bad taste of American readers:

 

“[E]very one of these ghastly ‘poems’ is an integral part of the aesthetic heritage of the American people, and few there are in whom they do not awaken at least a faint glow of emotion. They belong to the childhood of all of us, and they are as innocently beloved as the story of Washington and the cherry-tree.”

 

In other words, even Mencken, the arch-cynic, acknowledges that some of Johnson’s poems inspire a sort of emotional nostalgia. We associate them with childhood – our own and the nation’s. Longfellow is a misunderstood and underrated poet, not the author of “ghastly ‘poems,’” and Johnson does include lines by Dickinson and Frost. Mencken is most charming when he admits the ambivalence of his reactions to these poems:

 

“Most of the pieces which follow were in the schoolbooks of my own youth, and I can no more regard them with complete objectivity than I can so regard the Masonic watch-fob and gold-headed cane of my Uncle Julius. It is, of course, easy for me to convince myself, as a professional literary snob, that they are on all fours with cigarette papers or college yells, but let me run over them in my chamber, and immediately I begin to wobble, for they take me back to happy days.”

 

Happy Days was the title Mencken gave to the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy, published five years later.