SNARKY POEMS (COMMENT).

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.”)