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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This collection of comic verse is intended to include
nonsense, parody and comic satire, but not the more
familiar comic songs and nursery rhymes. I have, in
general, avoided 'light verse' or vers de societe, and I
have made no attempt to find suitable extracts from
the longer poems of Chaucer, Skelton, Marvell, Dryden,
Pope, Byron and Browning. Among long poems that
are exclusively, continuously and irresistibly funny,
Carroll's Hunting of the Snark is unique, and rather than
chop it into mincemeat I have omitted it altogether.
Even with these arbitrary limitations, the field is illdefined.
The frontiers of comic verse are, at the best,
shifting and uncertain. Light-hearted nonsense merges
imperceptibly into fantastic and imaginative poetry;
and comic poetry cannot be sharply distinguished from
humorous ballads that depend for their effect more on
the situation they describe than on their versification.
It is not easy to distinguish between lyric poems that
are intrinsically comic, and songs (such as Father
O'Flynn and Blaydon Races) that go to a rollicking tune
but are not outrageously funny in themselves; nor can
any definite and final boundary be drawn between the
satiric poem that ends in contemptuous or goodnatured
laughter and the more incisive satire that convicts
its object (and sometimes its author) of culpable
malice and stupidity. I can only say that I have chosen
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