PREFACE. AMERICAN humorous poetry scarcely existed before Holmes and Saxe. In their hands it became a highly polished and, in its way, most effective literary instrument. Their witty verse, however, like the contemporary American prose humor, represented by the school of Irving, might easily have been written, for the most part, in the mother country. There is the same sprightly metre, the same fondness for puns, the same spirit of geniality and good breeding that one finds, for example, in Tom Hood. Saxe even sings of shillings and pence and half-crowns, and places his Ghost-player on the boards of Drury Lane. But a new school of prose humorists, represented by Twain and Artemus Ward, was accompanied or immediately followed by a corresponding school of humorous poets whose work smacked strongly of the native soil. "The Biglow Papers" of Lowell, and the California ballads of Bret Harte stood for a type of humor worlds removed from that which was dominant a century earlier. Its success and point was not dependent on pun and epigram and metrical polish, but rather on its homely truth to fact in the depiction of novel though perfectly real conditions of American life. The most original type of our subsequent humorous poetry has been of similar character. We have become aware that there is no necessity for torturing language into fantastic shapes, for resorting to the conventional devices of European humorists. There is a surplus of irresistible fun in the present conditions of our great, multiform people, and when Riley gives us the Hoosier, Foss the Yankee farmer, Irwin Russell the negro, Leland and Follen Adams the German-American, the whole world laughs not at us, but with us. The editor regrets that the conservatism of their publishers has limited the selections from Harte, Field, Bunner, Saxe, and one or two others to the small number included. Yet these limitations are not to be viewed wholly in the light of a disadvantage. If a number of favorite poems are excluded, this only leaves room for a larger representation from sources less well-known but perhaps quite as meritorious. Looked at, indeed, from the reader's point of view rather than from that of the editor who has a pride in making his collection representative, there is a very distinct gain in having hackneyed selections replaced by those which present the fresher interest of unfamiliarity. Acknowledgments: Poems by the following authors are" used by permission of, and by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin & Co., authorized publishers of those authors: " Ralph Waldo Emerson, James T. Fields, Bret Harte, John Hay, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John G. Saxe, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Bayard Taylor, Charles Henry Webb. Bowen-Merrill Co. James Whitcomb Riley. Dodd, Mead & Co. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Harper & Brothers. Will Carleton, Charles G. Halpine, Charles Funk and Wagnalls. Edgar Fawcett. H. S. Stone & Co. R. K. Munkittrick ("October "). Small, Maynard & Co. Charlotte P. Stetson. Adam and Charles Black. Charles G. Leland. Charles Scribner's Sons. H. C. Bunner, Eugene Field. D. Appleton & Co. J. C. Harris. Frederick A. Stokes Company. S. M. Peck, F. D. Sherman. Lee & Shepard. Sam Walter Foss, Charles Follen Adams ("Leedle Yawcob Strauss," "Dot Baby off Mine," ""A Tale of a Nose"). The Century Company. Irwin Russell, J. A. Macon, Carolyn Wells, S. W. Personal Acknowledgments: Nathan Haskell Dole ("Larks and Nightingales "), Charles Follen Adams (all his poems included), James Jeffrey Roche (all his poems included), Albert Bigelow Paine (all his poems included), George Birdseye (all his poems included). |