[DOWNLOAD] "Sweetness & Spite: The Forgotten Pleasures of Light Verse" by The American Conservative # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Sweetness & Spite: The Forgotten Pleasures of Light Verse
- Author : The American Conservative
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 53 KB
Description
IT IS ALWAYS SAD when a valuable artist perishes. It is sadder still when a valuable art form perishes. It is saddest of all when a valuable art form did not need to perish, but was simply hounded to the culture's periphery by a deliberate, malicious process of what Fred Reed has called "enstupidation." One art form belonging firmly to this last group is light verse. Today it is a drab, tiny creature, which, insofar as the major media tend it at all, survives more in Britain than in the States. Things were very different in the two decades following World War II. Back then, among Americans, light verse flourished. It owed part of its exuberant health to the enlightened attitude of New Yorker editor Harold Ross, who had an admirable policy of paying substantially more for light-verse contributions than for conventional free-verse bromides. But The New Yorker was not light verse's only home. The New York Herald Tribune, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post all found abundant room for it. As critic William H. Pritchard observed, "Books by [light verse's] practitioners were reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, the general sense being that, in the age of [T.S.] Eliot and Wallace Stevens, it was an excellent alternative to high modernism." The practitioners themselves won Pulitzers and honorary doctorates. They could even earn a middle-class living by producing the stuff.