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Light Poetry
Light poetry or light verse is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Light poems are usually brief, can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play including puns, adventurous rhyme, and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition. While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope, and Auden, also excelled at light verse. Notable poets English * Richard Armour * Max Beerbohm * Hilaire Belloc * John Betjeman * Morris Bishop * Lord Byron * C. S. Calverley * Lewis Carroll * Charles E. Carryl * Brian P. Cleary * William Rossa Cole * Wendy Cope * Noël Coward * Alma Denny * Henry Austin Dobson * T. S. Eliot * Willard R. Espy * Gavin Ewart * Charles Gh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the '' Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Rossa Cole
William Rossa Cole (November 20, 1919 – August 2, 2000) was an American editor, anthologist, columnist, author, and writer of light verse. He produced around 75 books, most of them anthologies. Cole was born on November 20, 1919 to William Harrison Cole and Margaret O'Donovan-Rossa of Staten Island, New York. He was the younger brother of Rossa Willam Cole. His grandfather was the Irish Fenian leader Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. After military service in World War II, Cole took various jobs in the publishing industry, serving as publicity director at Alfred A. Knopf, publicity director and editor at Simon & Schuster, and publisher of William Cole Books at Viking Press. He was also a prolific writer and anthologist, editing and authoring over 75 books, as well as columns in '' Saturday Review''. Many of his books were honoured by the American Library Association, including '' I Went to the Animal Fair: A Book of Animal Poems'' (named a notable book of 1958, and on the List ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Lear
Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. Biography Early years Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joyce La Mers
Joyce La Mers (1920 – October 2013) was an American writer of light poetry. Biography La Mers was born Joyce Duncan in Billings, Montana in 1920, the third child and only daughter of a successful livestock dealer. The Duncan family was devastated during the Great Depression, losing the family farm, and moved to Fresno, California in 1938. During World War II La Mers dropped out of Fresno State University, where she was pursuing a degree in journalism, and later married her boyfriend Tom Carlile. She worked as a homemaker and mother to the couple's two children until their divorce 17 years later, and subsequently got a job as a secretary and then as a copy writer at an advertising firm. Her 1960, marriage to her second husband, design engineer Herbert La Mers, produced one daughter, and lasted until his death in 2003. La Mers published her first poem in '' The Southern Churchman'' when she was seven years old. Since then her poetry has appeared in ''The Wall Street Journal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Jacobs
Franklin Jacobs (May 30, 1929 – April 5, 2021) was an American author of satires, known primarily for his work in '' Mad'', to which he contributed from 1957 to 2014. Jacobs wrote a wide variety of lampoons and spoof, but was best known as a versifier who contributed parodies of famous song lyrics and poems.Bill Finger Award In 2009, Jacobs described himself as "the least-known writer of hysterical light verse in the United States." In 2021, musical parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic told the '''', “I absolutely devoured every issue [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Hood
Thomas Hood (23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845) was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as " The Bridge of Sighs" and " The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for ''The London Magazine'', '' Athenaeum'', and ''Punch''. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, had lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson.Rossetti, W. M. Biographical Introduction''The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood'' (London, 1903). Hood was the father of the playwright and humorist Tom Hood (1835–1874) and the children's writer Frances Freeling Broderip (1830–1878). Early life Thomas Hood was born to Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Sands in the Poultry (Cheapside), London, above his father's bookshop. His father's family had been Scottish farmers from the village of Errol near Dundee. The elder Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oliver Herford
Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935) was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy ''bon mots'' and skewed sense of humor. He was born in Sheffield, England on 2 December 1860 to Rev. Brooke Herford and Hannah Hankinson Herford. Oliver's father, a Unitarian minister, moved the family to Chicago in 1876 and to Boston in 1882. Oliver attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, from 1877 to 1879. Later he studied art at the Slade School in London and the Académie Julien in Paris. Afterward, he moved to New York, where he lived until his death. "Herford, regarded as the American Oscar Wilde, was known for his wit".Ashley, Mike, editor. Introduction to "When Time Turned" by Ethel Watts Mumford in ''The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers'', Dover Publications, 2015p. 3./ref> His sister Beatrice Herford was also a humorist, delivering comic monologues on stage. To appeal to Christmas shoppers in 1902, Ethel M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Guiterman
Arthur Guiterman (; November 20, 1871 Vienna – January 11, 1943 New York) was an American writer best known for his humorous poems. Life and career Guiterman was born of American parents in Vienna. His father was Alexander Gütermann, born in the Bavarian village Redwitz an der Rodach, and his mother was Louisa Wolf, born in Cincinnati. Arthur graduated from the City College of New York in 1891, and later was married in 1909 to Vida Lindo. He was an editor of the '' Woman's Home Companion'' and the ''Literary Digest''. In 1910, he cofounded the Poetry Society of America, and later served as its president in 1925–26. An example of his humour is a poem that talks about modern progress, with rhyming couplets such as "First dentistry was painless;/Then bicycles were chainless". It ends on a more telling note: Another Guiterman poem, "On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness", illustrates the philosophy also incorporated into his humorous rhymes: Perhaps his most-quoted poem is hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Ghigna
Charles Ghigna (born August 25, 1946), known also as Father Goose is an American poet and author of children's and adults' books. He has written more than 5,000 poems and 100 books. Ghigna was born in Bayside, Queens. His parents relocated to Fort Myers, Florida when he was five. Ghigna graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and a Master of Education degree in 1970. In 1974, he became a poet-in-residence and started teaching creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). He subsequently worked on the children's television show ''Cabbages and Kings'' and in 1979 taught creative writing at Samford University Samford University is a private Christian university in Homewood, Alabama. In 1841, the university was founded as Howard College by Baptists. Samford University describes itself as the 87th oldest institution of higher learning in the United St .... Ghigna's first book of poetry, ''Returning to Earth'', was published in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gavin Ewart
Gavin Buchanan Ewart FRSL (4 February 1916 – 23 October 1995) was a British poet who contributed to Geoffrey Grigson's ''New Verse'' at the age of seventeen. Life Ewart was born in London and educated at Wellington College, before entering Christ's College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1937 and an M.A. in 1942. After active service as a Royal Artillery officer during World War II, he worked in publishing and with the British Council before becoming an advertising copywriter in 1952. He lived at Kenilworth Court in Putney, London, and a blue plaque at Kenilworth Court commemorates this. Poetry From the age of 17, when his poetry was first printed in Geoffrey Grigson's ''New Verse'', Ewart acquired a reputation for wit and accomplishment through such works as "Phallus in Wonderland", and ''Poems and Songs'', which appeared in 1939 and was his first collection. The Second World War disrupted his development as a poet, however, and he published no further volumes u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Willard R
Willard may refer to: People * Willard (name) Geography Places in the United States * Willard, Colorado * Willard, Georgia * Willard, Kansas * Willard, Kentucky * Willard, Michigan, a small unincorporated community in Beaver Township, Bay County, Michigan * Willard, Missouri * Willard, New Mexico * Willard, New York * Willard, North Carolina * Willard, Ohio * Willard, Utah * Willard Bay, Utah, a reservoir * South Willard, Utah * Willard, Virginia * Willard, Washington * Willard, Rusk County, Wisconsin, a town * Willard, Clark County, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community * Willards, Maryland Places other than settlements * The Willard InterContinental Washington, a historic hotel in Washington, DC * Willard House (other), several houses * Willard Residential College, a Northwestern University residential hall * J. Willard Marriott Library, at the University of Utah * University of Illinois Willard Airport * Willard Drug Treatment Center, a specialized stat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Austin Dobson
Henry Austin Dobson (18 January 1840 – 2 September 1921), commonly Austin Dobson, was an English poet and essayist. Life He was born at Plymouth, the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, a civil engineer, of French descent. When he was about eight, the family moved to Holyhead, and his first school was at Beaumaris in Anglesey. He was later educated at Coventry, and the Gymnase, Strasbourg. He returned at the age of sixteen with the intention of becoming a civil engineer. (His younger brother James would in fact become a noted engineer, helping complete the Buenos Aires harbour works in the 1880s and 1890s.) At the beginning of his career, he continued to study at the South Kensington School of Art, in his spare time, but without definite ambition. In December 1856 he entered the Board of Trade, gradually rising to the rank of principal in the harbour department, from which he retired in the autumn of 1901. In 1868, he had married Frances Mary, daughter of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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