Us PoetsFrom "Tobogganing on Parnassus" by Franklin P. Adams
Wordsworth wrote some tawdry stuff;
Much of Moore I have forgotten;
Parts of Tennyson are guff;
Bits of Byron, too, are rotten.
All of Browning isn't great;
There are slipshod lines in Shelley;
Every one knows Homer's fate;
Some of Keats is vermicelli.
Sometimes Shakespeare hit the slide,
Not to mention Pope or Milton;
Some of Southey's stuff is snide.
Some of Spenser's simply Stilton.
When one has to boil the pot,
One can't always watch the kittle.
You may credit it or not--
Now and then _I_ slump a little!
Nowadays, Franklin Adams is little remembered. But, between the wars, he was a prominent New York columnist and a leading member of the Algonquin Round Table - he once said of Dorothy Parker that he had "raised her from a couplet".
In his humorous column, "The Conning Tower", Adams frequently published readers' contributions and assiduously promoted new writers, including James Thurber and Eugene O'Neil.
These days, his aphorisms are sometimes quoted but his light verse is all but forgotten. Which is a shame, because some of it is delightful (To a Thesaurus being a fine example).
