The Humorous Poetry of the English Language

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Title: The Humourous Poetry of the English Language
Author: James Parton
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6652]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
HUMOUROUS POETRY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ***
Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE HUMOROUS POETRY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,
FROM CHAUCER TO SAXE.
Narratives, Satires, Enigmas, Burlesques, Parodies, Travesties,
Epigrams, Epitaphs, Translations, Including the Most Celebrated
Comic Poems of the Anti-Jacobin, Rejected Addresses, the Ingoldsby
Legends, Blackwood's Magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, and Punch.
With More Than Two Hundred Epigrams, and the Choicest Humorous
Poetry of Wolcott, Cowper, Lamb, Thackeray, Praed, Swift, Scott,
Holmes, Aytoun, Gay, Burns, Southey, Saxe, Hood, Prior, Coleridge,
Byron, Moore, Lowell, Etc.
WITH
NOTES, EXPLANATORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL,
BY JAMES PARTON.
PREFACE.
The design of the projector of this volume was, that it should contain
the Best of the shorter humorous poems in the literatures of England
and the United States, except:
Poems so local or cotemporary in subject or allusion, as not to be
readily understood by the modern American reader;
Poems which, from the freedom of expression allowed in the healthy
ages, can not now be read aloud in a company of men and women;

Poems that have become perfectly familiar to every body, from their
incessant reproduction in school-books and newspapers; and
Poems by living American authors, who have collected their humorous
pieces from the periodicals in which most of them originally appeared,
and given them to the world in their own names.
Holmes, Saxe, and Lowell are, therefore, only REPRESENTED in this
collection. To have done more than fairly represent them, had been to
infringe rights which are doubly sacred, because they are not protected
by law. To have done less would have deprived the reader of a most
convenient means of observing that, in a kind of composition confessed
to be among the most difficult, our native wits are not excelled by
foreign.
The editor expected to be embarrassed with a profusion of material for
his purpose. But, on a survey of the poetical literature of the two
countries, it was discovered that, of really excellent humorous poetry,
of the kinds universally interesting, untainted by obscenity, not marred
by coarseness of language, nor obscured by remote allusion, the
quantity in existence is not great. It is thought that this volume contains
a very large proportion of the best pieces that haveappeared.
An unexpected feature of the book is, that there is not a line in it by a
female hand. The alleged foibles of the Fair have given occasion to
libraries of comic verse; yet, with diligent search, no humorous poems
by women have been found which are of merit sufficient to give them
claim to a place in a collection like this. That lively wit and graceful
gayety, that quick perception of the absurd, which ladies are
continually displaying in their conversation and correspondence, never,
it seems, suggest the successful epigram, or inspire happy satirical
verse.
The reader will not be annoyed by an impertinent superfluity of notes.
At the end of the volume may be found a list of the sources from which
its contents have been taken. For the convenience of those who live
remote from biographical dictionaries, a few dates and other particulars
have been added to the mention of each name. For valuable

contributions to this portion of the volume, and for much

well-directed work upon other parts of it, the reader is indebted to Mr.
T. BUTLER GUNN, of this city.
There is, certainly, nothing more delightful than the fun of a man of
genius. Humor, as Mr. Thackeray observes, is charming, and poetry is