'If the Nation Is to Be Saved From This Menace'

“To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets.” 

P.G. Wodehouse is being kind. He wrote “The Alarming Spread of Poetry” in 1916 when the blight was fresh and perhaps still reversible. His Exhibit A is Edgar Lee Masters, vers libre and Spoon River Anthology (1914), which reads today like Paradise Lost compared to most of what gets published. He's out to condemn not "minor" poets so much as mediocre, pretentious, boring poets.

“It is too early yet,” Wodehouse writes, “to judge the full effects of [Masters'] horrid discovery, but there is no doubt that he has taken the lid off and unleashed forces over which none can have any control. All those decent restrictions which used to check poets have vanished, and who shall say what will be the outcome?”

 

Wodehouse was an accomplished lyricist. He knew what he was talking about. His books are laced with allusions to the great poets of the past – most of whom common readers would have recognized in 1916. His aim was always not to mystify but to entertain:

 

In Very Good, Jeeves! (1930), Bertie Wooster misquotes the most famous stage direction in the language, from The Winter’s Tale: “Remember what the poet Shakespeare said, Jeeves? ‘Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear.’ You’ll find it in one of his plays.”

 

In The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Bertie again misquotes when gushing from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: “In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.”

 

And in Joy in the Morning (1946), Bertie says, “One false step, and he’ll swoop on me like the – who was it who came down like a wolf on the fold?” and Jeeves replies, “The Assyrian, sir.” That’s Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”

 

“Who can say,” Wodehouse asks, “where this thing will end? Vers libre is within the reach of all. A sleeping nation has wakened to the realization that there is money to be made out of chopping its prose into bits. Something must be done shortly if the nation is to be saved from this menace.”

 

I’m partial to the succinct definition of poetry offered by J.V. Cunningham in “Poetry, Structure, and Tradition” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1978): “metrical composition.”

 

Wodehouse died on St. Valentine’s Day in 1975 at age ninety-three after publishing more than ninety books, including seventy-one novels. He is consistently the funniest writer in the language whose surname is not Waugh.