'Poets Who Are Plain and Gladsome'

Being or pretending to be a philistine is great fun. It was one of Philip Larkin’s favorite ruses (“Books are a load of crap”). It’s certain to rile the pompous and pretentious, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the sputtering. I’ve happened on a first-rate anthology of verse designed to vex graduate students and others among the flatulently affected: What Cheer: An Anthology of American and British Humorous and Witty Verse Gathered, Sifted, and Salted (1945; reprinted in 1946 as The Pocket Book of Humorous Verse), edited by David McCord (1897-1997). 

In his introduction, McCord explains why he rejects the phrase “light verse”: “A great deal of light verse is little more than a facile and charming exercise in the technique of rhyme and meter. . . . It pleases the eye and ear, reads well aloud, is polished as a pipkin—but is not necessarily funny or witty.”

 

This rings true. So much light verse is nonsense verse in disguise or an indulgence in the cheaply topical. You might briefly enjoy it if you agree with the sentiment but it seldom inspires helpless laughter and is unlikely to be read a second time. Granted, those are high standards. Much that we find “funny” merits a grunt of approval rather than tears-and-snot laughter.

 

“Laughter,” McCord writes, “is a basic commodity, an old affair in the world, an abstraction and reaction about which few will quarrel. So this book is based on nothing less — on the laughter of humor, something audible and contagious; on the laughter of wit, with something swift and sudden in the queer little reflex tightening about the eyes.”

 

Much of the chapter titled “Life & Letters” consists of poems puncturing literary pomposity – basically, Modernism and its offspring. Here is “After Reading the Reviews of Finnegans Wake” by Melville Cane:

 

“Nothing has been quite the same

Since I heard your liquid name,

Since it cast a magic spell,

Anna Livia Plurabelle.

 

“Maid or river, bird or beast,

Doesn’t matter in the least;

Quite enough that tongue may tell

Anna Livia Plurabelle.

 

“What you’ve done, you’ll never guess,

To my stream of consciousness!

Hang the meaning! What the hell!

Anna Livia Plurabelle.”

 

Here is “A Salute to the Modern Language Association, Convening in the Hotel Pennsylvania, December 28^th-30^th” by Morris Bishop, the historian, biographer and Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell. It suggests that self-important pretentiousness is nothing new with the MLA:

 

“The Modern Language Association

Meets in the Hotel Pennsylvania,

And the suave Greeters in consternations

Hark to the guests indulging their mania

 

“For papers in ‘Adalbert Stifter as the Spokesman of Middle-Class Conservatism,”

And ‘The American Revolution in the Gazette de Leyde and the Affaires de l’Angleterre at de l’Amerique,”

And ‘Emerson and the Conflict Between Platonic and Kantian Idealism,’

And ‘Dialektgeographie und Textkritik,’

 

“And ‘Vestris and Macready: Nineteenth-Century Management at the Parting of the Ways,’

And ‘Pharyngeal Changes in vowel and Consonant Articulation,’

And ‘More Light on Molière's Theater in 1672-73, from Le Registre d’Hubert, Archives of the Comédie-Française,

And ‘Diderot’s Theory of Imitation.’

 

“May culture’s glossolalia, clinging to

In Exhibit Rooms in Parlor A,

Sober a while the tempestuous singing

Of fraternal conventions, untimely gay:

 

“May your influence quell, like a panacea,

A business assembly’s financial fevers,

With the faint, sweet memory of ‘Observaciones sobre la aspiración de H en Andalucia,’

And ‘The Stimmsprung (Voice Leap) of Sievers.’”  

 

Both poems were originally published in The New Yorker in 1939 and 1938, respectively. Another one from that magazine, in 1939, “The Reader Writes” by Carl Crane (a pseudonym for the great Peter de Vries):

 

“What poets mean by what they mean

Is tougher than it’s ever been.

 

“Some swear that Ezra Pound’s the ticket;

I get lost in Ezra’s thicket.

 

“I’m stumped by what the lilacs bring

To T.S. Eliot in the spring.

 

“I sit up late at night deciding

What goes on in Laura Riding.

 

“Ah, never will the masses know

What Auden means, who loves them so.

 

“Rare is the nugget I can fish out

From subtleties the poets dish out;

 

“In fact, I think it’s time we had some

Poets who are plain and gladsome,

 

“Who shun the effort it must cost

To seem more deep than Robert Frost.”