The Humorous Poetry of the English Language; from Chaucer to Saxe — A Closer Reading

The Editor's Curatorial Voice

Parton's preface reveals a self-conscious editor who expected an embarrassment of riches but found the pool of suitable material surprisingly small. He writes of poems that are “universally interesting, untainted by obscenity, not marred by coarseness of language, nor obscured by remote allusion.” This triple filter—moral, linguistic, and temporal—shapes the volume. The editor also notes that Holmes, Saxe, and Lowell are only “represented,” not fully collected, because their works were still under copyright. Such frankness about legal and aesthetic constraints gives the preface a documentary quality, positioning the anthology as a practical compromise rather than a definitive canon.

Mock-Heroic Excess in the Excerpts

The longest excerpt, a poem addressed to wine, parodies epic conventions with relentless classical machinery: “Celestial Liquor! thou that didst inspire / Maro and Flaccus, and the Grecian bard.” The verse piles up mythological references, Latin place names, and inflated diction—“the purple grapes, / In largest clusters pendent”—to comic effect. The poet contrasts ancient symposia with modern tavern life: “Swiftly we hie to Devil, young or old,” a reference to the Devil Tavern near Temple Bar. The shift from heroic invocation to a barman’s “scrapes and humil cringe” undercuts the grandeur, a technique typical of the burlesque tradition Parton includes.

Structural Variety and Generic Range

The anthology’s subtitle lists an array of forms: “Narratives, Satires, Enigmas, Burlesques, Parodies, Travesties, Epigrams, Epitaphs, Translations.” This catalog signals that the volume does not confine itself to light verse but embraces learned parody, political satire, and even riddles. The excerpt from the preface mentions the Anti-Jacobin, Rejected Addresses, the Ingoldsby Legends, and Punch as sources, indicating a mix of periodical humor and literary set-pieces. Readers can expect abrupt shifts in register—from Swift’s savage irony to Hood’s punning pathos—within the same binding.

What the Excerpts Leave Unsaid

The excerpts provide only the preface and a single mock-heroic poem, so the full range of the anthology remains inferred. Parton’s claim that the volume contains “a very large proportion of the best pieces” cannot be verified from these fragments. The absence of any female-authored humor, which the editor acknowledges, raises questions about the criteria of merit and the social networks that shaped the collection. Readers should approach the anthology as a historically situated artifact—one that reveals as much about Victorian taste as about the poems it preserves.

Parton’s volume rewards readers who enjoy tracing the evolution of comic forms across centuries. The preface’s frankness about exclusions—obscenity, locality, over-familiarity, and gender—offers a useful lens for evaluating each poem’s place in the collection. Rather than a comprehensive treasury, this is a curated selection shaped by the editor’s judgments, which are as instructive as the verses themselves.

Reading Parton's old anthology, I kept noticing the empty spaces where women's voices should have been—a quiet omission that feels like a half-finished sentence. It reminded me of another kind of everyday poetry, the sort found in trolley schedules and fare-box musings, which I stumbled upon later in The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor — Key Ideas to Explore. Both collections chase the ordinary, yet one left so much unsaid.