Guy Noel Pocock (1880–1955)

This Everyman anthology, originally published in 1940, collects late 19th and early 20th century humorous writing of a kind which now tends to seem very ponderous. It is the kind of thing that I used to leaf through in old copies of Punch, ignoring the text and looking for the cartoons. Much of it is verbose anecdote, facetious narrative, caricatures of bores or socially pretentious ladies, or verse which treats trivial subjects in a mock-serious manner (such as Ruth Pitter's "Maternal Love show more Triumphant, or Song of the Virtuous Female Spider").

Some of the excerpts are fine, but one might as well have the whole book rather than a mere chunk of Cold Comfort Farm, The Once and Future King, or one of Wodehouse's tales of Jeeves and Wooster. There are some archetypal limericks and clerihews, but you can find those anywhere. I did enjoy A. D. Godley's classic poem taking "Motor Bus" as a Latin phrase and declining it ("motorem bum", "motores bi", etc.), to the amusement of anyone who studied Latin at school; Quiller-Couch devoting a string of sapphics to the romance of Lady Jane and her gardener; and magisterial parodies of G. K. Chesterton by Sir John Squire and of Henry James by Sir Max Beerbohm. (The Chesterton parody in particular is notably more entertaining than the piece from Chesterton himself.) But I don't think the highlights justify keeping the whole volume on my shelf.

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The low-ish rating for the book is just me. I'm sure that a reader who better appreciates poetry would rate it higher. I never really learned how to properly read poetry, probably because I didn't want to be bothered by dwelling on nuanced meaning. For me, that is especially true of the Romance exponents. I persevered, however, and found that I enjoyed to two by Kipling and Masefield included at the back of the book.

This collection of verse is fun to read, would be fun to listen to and is thoroughly entertaining.

A nice little collection of poems grouped under the following headings: England, The Call of the Sea, The Call of the Country, Animals, The Great War, Fancy, Life and Death, and Free Verse. I remember my favourite English master using this at High School.