'Light Verse Aims at the Intellect'

“I suppose I am alluding to that intangible which amateurs call Inspiration. There is such a thing as inspiration (lower case), but it is no miracle. It is the reward handed to a writer for hard work and good conduct.” 

Seasoned writers, whether sonneteers or P.R. hacks, will understand. Write long enough, with sufficient concentration, trusting the process, and you too will know the flash of inspiration and be rewarded with the word or sentence you could never have foreseen. Phyllis McGinley’s encouraging words open her essay “The Light Side of the Moon,” published in the Autumn 1965 issue of The American Scholar. Vladimir Nabokov would agree. In his 1973 essay “Inspiration” he describes the sensation as “a prefatory glow not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack.”

 

Fashion is fickle and cruel, especially literary fashion. McGinley’s Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, with Seventy New Poems (1960) was published with a foreword by W.H. Auden and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. Her command of and devotion to meter and rhyme was absolute. She appeared on the cover of Time when that still meant something, on June 18, 1965. McGinley (1905-78) was a serious, amusing, accessible poet when such a description was not oxymoronic. She was a Roman Catholic and often wrote about her faith. She occasionally reminds me of John Cheever, minus the alcoholism and bisexuality. If we’re talking female poets, I would read McGinley any day over Adrienne Rich. McGinley goes on about inspiration:

 

“It is the felicitous word sliding, after hours of evasion, obediently into place. It is a sudden comprehension of  how to manufacture an effect, finish off a line or a stanza. At the triumphant moment this gift may seem like magic, but actually it is the result of effort, practice, and the slight temperature a sulky brain is apt to run when it is pushed beyond its usual exertions.”

 

McGinley’s message, especially for young writers, is this: inspiration is not a passive phenomenon. It’s not a product of virtue or luck. Work hard and it may arrive, but then it may not. Just keep working. McGinley is refreshingly unembarrassed by having let the Modernist movement pass her by. In “On the Prevalence of Literary Writers” she writes:

 

“It’s hard

Keeping up with the avant-garde.

There was the time that Donne

Had a place in the sun.

His lettres were belles of pure gold

And they tolled and they tolled and they tolled,

Until critics in suitable haunts

Took up Kafka (Franz).

Then everyone wanted to herald

The genius of Scott Fitzgerald.

And after, among Prominent Names,

It was utterly Henry James.”

 

In his tribute to light verse, “Sweetness & Spite,” R.J. Stove devotes the most space to McGinley:

 

“Miss McGinley actually disliked the rubric ‘light verse,’ preferring to call her manner ‘poetry of wit.’ She regarded herself as belonging to the tradition of 17th-century England’s so-called Cavalier Poets—Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, and John Suckling, to name a handful—who eschewed the self-conscious, syntax-wrecking convolutions of John Donne and his followers in favor of a sweet urbanity. Something of this urbanity characterizes McGinley’s own oeuvre.”

 

McGinley was no dolt. She knew the literary tradition and her place in it. Here she defines that much-debated, too often snobbishly denigrated category, “light verse”:

 

“Between it and poetry is no real division except impact. Light verse like serious poetry can be either good or bad, trivial or important. It can range from newspaper doggerel to the imperial heights of Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (an example of how light and heavy poetry merge into a work of art, the manner being playful but the subject, Love and Death). Still, it does have a different target from its sister-craft. Serious poetry engages the emotions. Light verse aims at the intellect which it wishes to amuse and divert. (Mistrust that definition, too, like all generalities. Much serious modern poetry, such as Eliot’s, draws a bow at the mind rather than the heart.)”