SNARKY POEMS (COMMENT). Lee in his comment on favorite poems mentions some funny poems and says that he likes snarky poems. Auden was an advocate of light verse, edited a couple anthologies of light verse, and, as I recall, said that about one third of the best poems were light verse. Mary Jane and I watched THE LIBERTINE with Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester. The movie was very accurate. I thought, the screen writer must have made up the part about Rochester teaching a girl to act on a bet, but I looked it up and it’s true. Rochester, no fawning courtier, once wrote an Impromptu on Charles II: “God bless our good and gracious king/ Whose promise none relies on;/ Who never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” (Charles II is generally thought to have gotten the better of Rochester by replying to the effect that “That’s because I decide what I say, and I have advisers to tell me what to do.”)