Life, 1908-12-17 · page 7 of 28
Life — December 17, 1908 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page presents "A Handy Guide for Verse Writers" by Prof. Amasa P. Dantry, offering satirical advice on composing contemporary magazine poetry. The illustration shows six fashionably dressed figures representing typical subjects and personas in popular verse of the era. The satire mocks formulaic poetry by reducing it to simple recipes: "The Race," "The Magic Word," and "Baal" are presented as interchangeable templates using clichéd imagery (mountains of gold, seas of jeweled foam, demon angels). The guide suggests that contemporary verse-writers simply torture proverbs and old sayings into predictable forms rather than creating original work. The joke targets the mass production of sentimental, derivative poetry flooding American magazines, suggesting that serious literary work had been replaced by manufactured sentiment designed for popular consumption.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A Handy Guide for Verse Writers ROF. AMASA P. DANTRY, Ph.D., the well-known authority on Belles Lettres, has discovered the principle underlying all contemporary magazine verse. His monograph on the subject is most exhaustive, and rather beyond the intelligence of the average verse writer, and therefore we have presented the idea in simpler form. The receipt is 2s follows: Take any proverb, the older the better, or some wornout platitude, and torture it into the form of a quatrain. It is necessary to steel the heart against the piteous cries of the aforementioned proverb, as the operation is likely to be anything but pleasant for it. To illustrate this principle more clearly, we append several typical ex- amples of the work of the foremost writers of the day, and the old saws VSYCHICAL RESEARCHES: from which, according to Professor Dantry, they were derived: 1, THE RACE Boy, thou shalt sce some pass thee at the starting, Gaining by guile—ab, let their worst. Keep thou thy road, nor right nor left departing, And at the finish all shall hail thee— First! John Sembrick Bigs. (Honesty is the best policy.) (The race is not always to the swift.) them do 1. THE MAGIC WoRD Yea, thou mayst tell me of the Lands of Morning,— Mountains of gold, and seas of jew- elled foam; Still thou art blind, and know not, in thy scorning, The perfect magic of the one word— Home! Limpon Dullard. (There's no place like home.) (A rolling stone gathers no moss.) 1, BAAL The world bowed down before thy brazen glory, Swart demon-god, ablaze with bestial lust For blood of babes. and gory Thou, who ruled with their dust. George Investor Seasick. Ensanguined ghoul all, now minglest (Pride goeth before a fall.) (Death is the great leveler.) With the help of these hints, and with such stirring examples as models, we feel sure that anybody with a working knowledge of the English language can soon learn to turn out work that will be acceptable in every way to the majority of editors. Henry M. Hoyt, Ir. comicbooks.com