Volume 41, Number 21 · December 22, 1994
'Trapping Fairies in West Virginia'
By John Bayley
The Oxford Book of Comic Verse
edited by John Gross
Oxford University Press, 512 pp., $25.00
Max Beerbohm: Collected Verse
edited with an introduction and notes by J. G. Riewald
Shoe String Press/Archon Books, 221 pp., $42.50
A Christmas Garland
woven by Max Beerbohm. illustrations by the author, Introduction by N. John Hall
Yale University Press, 197 pp., $25.00
Ars est celare artem, according to the Latin proverb—art lies in the concealment of art. It ain't necessarily so; but after reading through The Oxford Book of Comic Verse one is certainly forced to the conclusion that the finest comic effects, put into meter, are deadpan, not apparently aware of themselves as comic. This may happen in two ways. In the eighteenth century wit was the thing, rather than what was merely 'comick,' and verse reflects this in the taut and dazzling couplets of Pope and Swift, which we are to admire as performance rather than indulge in any sort of mirth, let alone a horse laugh. One of the best and rarest specimens John Gross provides is an extract from Matthew Green's The Spleen.
Review, 3311 words
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