Word: couplet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Princeton students once voted him the world's worst poet, and a jeering couplet hounded him for years: "I'd rather flunk my Wassermann test/Than read a poem by Edgar Guest."* Such insults missed their mark, for Edgar Albert Guest never even pretended to be a poet. Said he: "I am a newspaperman who writes verse." And at the time he died last week at 77, Edgar Guest's success as a verse-writing newspaperman had never before been equaled and may never be again...
Poetry readings are a little tough on poets and audience alike. The poet, uncertain of his audience, must perhaps pass up good poems in favor of inferior but more easily assimilated material. He is likely to find that a catchy closing couplet will draw more audience reaction than a more profound piece...
With this couplet, G. K. Chesterton hymned the traditional British inability to get from place to place by a direct route. About the only straight roads on the island are those laid out atop old Roman roads like famed Watling Street, which makes a 160-mile run from London to Wales. In the days of gas rationing, austerity and fewer cars, it was possible for the lucky few to speed across country or through cities with ease. But last week, its inadequate road net jammed with 8,000,000 cars, 1,500,000 motorcycles and uncounted millions of bicycles, Britain...
...rallying point of resistance. The West certainly has no grounds for claiming him as a political ally, and at best will have to live up to him as a moral one. Yet Zhivago has become one of those portents of freedom whose ends are incalculable. Among Moscow students a couplet goes...
...seemed very childish." Reminded of a youthfully immature shaft at Chekhov ("I like my Ibsen straight"). Eliot grinned: "That doesn't make sense to me now." As for the once admired A.E. Housman. he now dismisses him as a youthful "phase" but still approvingly quotes the couplet Housman wrote in his sleep...