The Oxford book of American light verse
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| Location | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Camden County Library District - Camdenton - Adult Nonfiction | 811.08 Oxford | Available |
| MLC - Richmond Heights Memorial Library - Nonfiction | 811.08 HARMON | Available |
| MLC - University City Public Library - Nonfiction | 811.07 OXF | Available |
| MLC - Webster Groves Public Library - Nonfiction | 811.08 OXFORD | On holds shelf |
| Ozark Regional-Ironton - Adult Non-Fiction | 811.07 OXF | Available |
| Rolla Public Library - Adult Nonfiction | NF 811.07 | Available |
| Salem Public Library - Adult Non-Fiction | 811.07 Oxf | Available |
| Sikeston Public Library - 800 - 899 | 811.08 H22 | Available |
Table of Contents
Contents
Anonymous / Yankee Doodle
Francis Hopkinson / Battle of the Kegs
St. George Tucker / Cynic
Discontented Student
Judge with the Sore Rump
Joel Barlow / Hasty Pudding (from "Canto I, Canto III")
Royall Tyler / Anacreontic to Flip
Widower
Original Epitaph on a Drunkard
Samuel Low / To a Segar
John Quincy Adams / Wants of Man
To Sally
Clement Moore / A Visit from St. Nicholas
Francis Scott Key / To My Cousin Mary, for Mending My Tobacco Pouch
Written at the White Sulphur Springs
Fitz-Greene Halleck / Fanny (Stanzas xlvi-lxviii)
Song
Lydia Huntley Sigourney / God Save the Plough
George Moses Horton / New Fashions
Snaps for Dinner, Snaps for Breakfast, and Snaps for Supper
Ralph Waldo Emerson / Fable
Test
Solution
Prudence
Nathaniel Parker Willis / Lady Jane: A Humorous Novel in Rhyme (Canto I, Stanzas xix-xxii and xci)
To the Lady in the Chemisette with Black Buttons
Declaration
To Helen in a Huff
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow / Village Blacksmith
Children's Hour
Paul Revere's Ride
John Greenleaf Whittier / Haschish
Barbara Frietchie
Barefoot Boy
Skipper Ireson's Ride
Thomas Holley Chivers / Lily Adair
Moon of Mobile
Oliver Wendell Holmes / Height of the Ridiculous
Æstivation
Deacon's Masterpiece
Ode for a Social Meeting
A Sea Dialogue
Edgar Allan Poe / Bells
James Thomas Fields / Owl Critic
Jupiter and Ten
James Russell Lowell / In an Album
A Misconception
Boss
from "The Biglow Papers" The Courtin'
Rev. Homer Wilbur's "Festina Lente"
Herman Melville / In a Garret
Bench of Boors
Attic Landscape
Lover and the Syringa-Bush
New Ancient of Days
Walt Whitman / A Boston Ballad
Charles Godfrey Leland / Hans Breitmann's Party
Breitmann in Politics
Phoebe Cary / Samuel Brown
Day is Done
Jacob
William Allen Butler / Nothing To Wear
Bayard Taylor / Ballad of Hiram Hover
Palabras Grandiosas
Nauvoo
Stephen Collins Foster / Gwine To Run All Night; or, De Camptown Races
Oh! Susanna.
Anonymous / Little Brown Jug
Sweet Betsey from Pike
Clementine
Starving to Death on a Government Claim
Factory Girl's Come-All-Ye
An Ode on Gas
John Townsend Trowbridge / Darius Greene and His Flying-Machine
Recollections of "Lalla Rookh"
Filling an Order
Septimus Winner / Ten Little Injuns
Coolie Chinee
Lilliputian's Beer Song
Emily Dickinson / A bird came down the walk
I like to see it lap the miles
His Mansion in the Pool
Mary Mapes Dodge / Zealless Xylographer
Edmund Clarence Stedman / Ballad of Lager Bier
George Arnold / Beer
Charles H. Webb ("John Paul")/ Autumn Leaves
At the Ball!
Samuel Langhorne Clemens ("Mark Twain") / Aged Pilot Man (from "Roughing It")
Imitation of Julia A. Moore (from "Following the Equator")
Emmeline Grangerford's "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd" (from "Huckleberry Finn")
Thomas Bailey Aldrich / Fannie
At a Reading
Anonymous / Young Woman from Aenos
Bret Harte / Colenso Rhymes for Orthodox Children
Schemmelfenning
Plain Language from Truthful James
Society upon the Stanislaus
R.H. Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr") / Rejected "National Hymns"
American Traveller
Columbia's Agony
Editor's Wooing
Neutral British Gentleman
Tuscalossa Sam
Dear Father, Look Up
When Your Cheap Divorce Is Granted
O, Be Not Too Hasty, My Dearest
Innes Randolph / Rebel
Anonymous / Two Appeals to John Harralson, Agent, Nitre and Mining Bureau, C.S.A.
John Hay / Pledge at Spunky Point
Good and Bad Luck
Charles E. Carryl / A Nautical Ballad
Charles Heber Clark ("Max Adeler") / Mr. Slimmer's Funeral Verses for the Morning Argus
Alexander McGlue
Willie
Johnny Smith
Hanner
Mrs. McFadden
Alexander
Charles Follen Adams / To Bary Jade
Repartée
John Barley-Corn, My Foe
Misplaced Sympathy
My Infundibuliform Hat
Ambrose Bierce / from "The Devil's Dictionary" Body-Snatcher
Corporal
Egotist
Elegy
Lead
Nose
Orthography
Prospect
Safety-Clutch
Anonymous / Willie the Weeper
No More Booze
Drunkard and the Pig
Robert Jones Burdette / Orphan Born
"Soldier, Rest!"
John B. Tabb / Foot-Soldiers
Bicycles! Tricycles!
Close Quarters
A Rub
Tryst
Julia A. Moore / Grand Rapids
Ashtabula Disaster
Little Libbie
Sketch of Lord Byron's Life
James Whitcomb Riley / Craqueodoom
A Rose in October
When the Frost Is on the Punkin
Little Orphant Annie
Diners in the Kitchen
Ruth Mcenery Stuart / Endless Song
Fred Emerson Brooks / Foreigners at the Fair
Barnyard Melodies
Eugene Field / Little Peach
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Little Boy Blue
Duel
Samuel C. Bushnell / Boston
Samuel Minturn Peck / A Kiss in the Rain
John Philip Sousa / Feast of the Monkeys
Have You Seen the Lady?
H.C. Bunner / Poetry and the Poet
"Home, Sweet Home", with Variations
Ben King / If I Should Die
Mermaid
Hair-Tonic Bottle
Cultured Girl Again
Pessimist.
Anonymous / Kentucky Moonshiner
Roy Bean
Sam Walter Foss / Husband and Heathen
A Philosopher
Nixon Waterman / Cheer for the Consumer
If We Didn't Have to Eat
Hamlin Garland / Horses Chawin' Hay
Goin' Back T'morrer
Bliss Carman / A More Ancient Mariner
Oliver Brook Herford / Fall of J.W. Beane
Eve
Ernest lawrence Thayer / Casey at the Bat
Richard Hovey / Eleazar Wheelock
Barney McGee
J. Gordon Coogler / Alas! Carolina!
Alas! for the South!
To Amy
Byron
In Memorial
A Mustacheless Bard
A Pretty Girl
George Ade / Il Janitoro
Microbe's Serenade
R-E-M-O-R-S-E (from "The Sultan of Sulu")
Gelett Burgess / Purple Cow
Cinq Ans Aprés
Tom Masson / Enough
My Poker Girl
A Tragedy
He Took Her
Bert Leston Taylor ("B.L.T.") / Doxology
Those Flapjacks of Brown's
Upon Julia's Arctics
Aprilly
Edgar Lee Masters / Jonathan Swift Somers
Spooniad
Edwin Arlington Robinson / Variations of Greek Themes (II, III, IV)
Carolyn Wells / Diversions of the Re-Echo Club
John Palmer / Band Played On
Stephen Crane / A man said to the universe
Tell me not in joyous numbers
Anonymous / Big Rock Candy Mountains
Four Nights' Drunk
Frozen Logger
T.A. Daly / Pennsylvania Places
Arthur Guiterman / Song of Hate for Eels
Heredity
Brief Essay on Man
Everything in Its Place
Ben Harney / You've Been a Good Old Wagon, But You've Done Broke Down
Mister Johnson
Guy Wetmore Carryl / How a Girl Was Too Reckless of Grammar / Domineering Eagle and the Inventive Bratling
Robert Frost / Departmental
Hardship of Accounting
A Considerable speck
For Travelers Going Sidereal
Pride of Ancestry
Rose Family
Russell Hillard Loines / On a Magazine Sonnet
Amy Lowell / Painted Ceiling
Epitaph on a Young Poet Who Died Before Having Achieved Success
Gertrude Stein / Sacred Emily
Andrew B. Sterling / Under the Anheuser Bush
What You Goin' To Do When the Rent Comes 'Round?
Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis
Anonymous / Mademoiselle from Armentières
Wallace Irwin / Constant Cannibal Maiden
Hughie Cannon / Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?
Anthony Euwer / True Facts of the Case
Face
Don Marquis / certain maxims of archy
archy at the zoo
Carl Sandburg / from "The People, Yes" Section 32
Section 41
Section 42
On a Flimmering Floom You Shall Ride
One Modern Poet
Vachel Lindsay / Little Turtle
Two Old Crows
Jack Norworth / Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Wallace Stevens / Depression Before Spring
Pleasures of Merely Circulating
Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") / Composed in the Composing Room
Lines Where Beauty Lingers
Double Standard
Rich Man
If-
Witter Bynner / To a President
Edgar A. Guest / Home
Lemon Pie
Sausage
Joseph W. Stilwell / Lyric to Spring
William Carlos Williams / To a Poor Old Woman
Proletarian Portrait
To
To Greet a Letter-Carrier
These Purists
Ballad of Faith
Après le Bain
Intelligent Sheepman and the New Cars
Keith Preston / Lapsus Linguae
Effervescence and Evanescence
Ring Lardner / Parodies of Cole Porter's "Night and Day"
Hardly a man is now alive
Hail to thee, blithe owl
Quiescent, a person sits heart and soul
Abner Silver's "Pu-leeze! Mr. Hemingway!
Ezra Pound / An Immorality
Meditatio
Tame Cat
Ancient Music
Cantico del Sole
Louis Untermeyer / Song Tournament: New Style
Edgar A. Guest
Elinor Wylie / Simon Gerty
Marianne Moore / I May, I Might, I Must
Hometown Piece for Messers. Alston and Reese
W.S. Landor
T.S. Eliot / Aunt Helen
Cousin Nancy
Lines to Ralph Hodgson, Esqre.
Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
Newman Levy / Tannhauser
Rigoletto
John Crowe Ransom / Amphibious Crocodile
Philomela
Her Eyes
Our Two Worthies
Dog
Survey of Literature
Conrad Aiken / Obituary in Bitcherel
There once was a wicked young minister
Animula vagula blandula
Sighed a dear little shipboard divinity
Stoddard King / Hearth and Home
Breakfast Song in Time of Diet
Difference
Samuel Hoffenstein / Love-Songs, At Once Tender and Informative (I-XXIII)
Christopher Morley / Elegy Written in a Country Coal-Bin
Forever Ambrosia
Archibald MacLeish / Mother Goose's Garland
Corporate Entity
End of the World
Critical Observations
Edna St. Vincent Millay / From a Very Little Sphinx (I-VII).
Morris Bishop / Gas and Hot Air
Bishop Orders His Tomb in St. Praxed's
How To Treat Elves
Who'd Be a Hero (Fictional)?
Maxwell Bodenheim / Upper Family
Dorothy Parker / Comment
Résumé
News Item
One Perfect Rose
Partial Comfort
Cole Porter / Anything Goes
Let's Do It
My Heart Belongs to Daddy
You're the Top
Well, Did You Evah?
Brush Up Your Shakespeare
E.E. Cummings / Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once
Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal
slightly before the middle of Congressman Pudd
my sweet old etcetera
Q:dwo
flotsam and jetsam
a politician is an arse upon
meet mr universe (who clean ...
Bessie Smith / Empty Bed Blues
Oscar Hammerstein II / Kansas City
Money Isn't Everything!
There Is Nothin' Like a Dame
Lorenz Hart / Manhattan
Mountain Greenery
Blue Room
Lady Is a Tramp
Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Robert Hillyer / Moo!
Edmund Wilson / Drafts for a Quatrain
Something for My Russian Friends
Ira Gershwin / It Ain't Necessarily So
Blah, Blah, Blah
Kenneth Burke / Nursery Rhyme
Frigate Jones, the Pussyfooter
Civil Defense
Know Thyself
David McCord / Axolotl
Gloss
To a Certain Most Certainly Certain Critic
Mantis
Baccalaureate
History of Education
Epitaph on a Waiter
Anonymous / Heavyweight champ of Seattle
Stephen Vincent Benét / American Names
Hymn in Columbus Circle
A Nonsense Song
Ernest Hemingway / Ernest Liberal's Lament
Neo-Thomist Poem
Valentine
Vladimir Nabokov / A Literary Dinner
Ode to a Model
Billy Rose / Barney Google
Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?
E.B. White / Marble-Top
Window Ledge in the Atom Age
Langston Hughes / Bad Morning
Wake
What?
Little Lyric
Ennui
Situation
Be-Bop Boys
Hope
Ogden Nash / Invocation
Song of the Open Road
Lines to a World-Famous Poet Who Failed To Complete a World-Famous Poem; or, Come Clean, Mr. Guest!
Turtle
Panther
Rhinoceros
Genealogical Reflection
They Don't Speak English in Paris
Adventures of Isabel
Ant
Reflection on Ice-Breaking
Countee Cullen / For a Lady I Know
For a Mouthy Woman.
Richard Eberhart / I Went To See Irving Babbitt
Stanley Kunitz / Summing-up
Phyllis McGinley / Publisher's Party
About Children
Evening Musicale
Kenneth Rexroth / Fact
A Bestiary
Observations in a Cornish Teashop
Robert Penn Warren / Man in the Street
Helen Bevington / Mr. Rockefeller's Hat
Penguins in the Home
Mrs. Trollope in America
W.H. Suden / Asethetic Point of View
Henry Adams
T.S. Eliot
Theodore Roethke / Academic
Dinky
Cow
Sloth
Kitty-Cat Bird
A Rouse for Stevens
Johnny Mercer / I'm an Old Cowhand
Jubilation T. Cornpone
Glow-worm
Elder Olson / Childe Roland, etc.
Peter Devries / Beth Appleyard's Verses Loveliest of Pies
Bacchanal
Psychiatrist
Frank Loesser / Guys and Dolls
J.V. Cunningham / from "Doctor Drink" (3 and 4)
Uncollected Poems and Epigrams
Richard Harter Fogle / A Hawthorne Garland
Anonymous / Virtues of Carnation Milk
JOhn Berryman / Dream Song #4
American Lights, Seen from Off Abroad
George Hitchock / Three Found Poems
Randall Jarrell / Blind Sheep
William Stafford / Religion Back Home
Tennessee Williams / Carrousel Time
Sugar in the Cane
Kitchen Door Blues
Gold Tooth Blues
Reuel Denney / Fixer of Midnight
John Ciardi / Ballad of the Icondic
Goodnight
Dawn of the Space Age
To a Reviewer Who Admired My Book
On Evolution
Peter Viereck / 1912-1952, Full Cycle
William Jay Smith / Dachshunds
Random Generation of English Sentences; or, The Revenge of the Poets
William Cole / Marriage Couplet
Mutual Problem
Poor Kid
Mysterious East
What a Friend We Have in Chesses!
Lawrence Ferlinghetti / Underwear
Max Shulman / Honest Abe Lincoln-
Howard Nemerov / Epigrams
Howard Moss / Cats and Dogs
Alan Dugan / On a Seven-Day Diary
Anthony Hecht / Dover Bitch
Improvisations on Aesop
Firmness
From the Grove Press
Vice
Norman Mailer / Devils
Louis Simpson / New Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
On the Lawn at the Villa
Edward Gorey / There was young woman named Plunnery
Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy
Babe, with a cry brief and dismal
A lady who signs herself "Vexed"
From the bathing machine came a din
Carolyn Kizer / One to Nothing
Kenneth Koch / A Poem of the Forty-eight States
A.R. Ammons / First Carolina Said-Song
Second Carolina Said-Song
Auto Mobile
Chasm
Needs
Cleavage
Coward.
Robert Creeley / She Went to Stay
Ballad of the Despairing Husband
Man
Allen Ginsberg / Bop Lyrics
Frank O'Hara / To the Film Industry in Crisis
James Merrill / Tomorrows
James Wright / Love in a Warm Room in Winter
Donald Hall / To a Waterfowl
Professor Gratt
Breasts
John Hollander / To the Lady Portrayed by Margaret Dumont
Heliogabalus
Last Words
Appearance and Reality
Historical Reflections
No Foundation
X.J. Kennedy / In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day
Japanese Beetles
Last Lines
Jonathan Williams / Hermit Cackleberry Brown, on Human Vanity
Uncle Iv Surveys His Domain from His Rocker of a Sunday Afternoon as Aunt Dory Starts to Chop Kindling
Mrs. Sadie Grindstaff, Weaver and Factotum, Explains the Work-Principle to the Modern World
Three Sayings from Highlands, North Carolina
Anthropophagites See a Sign on NC Highway 177 That Looks Like Heaven
John Barth / Minister's Last Lay (from "Anonymiad")
Gregory Corso / Marriage
Stephen Sondheim / Gee, Officer Krupke
George Starbuck / On First Looking in on Blodgett's Keat's "Chapman's Homer"
High Renaissance
Chip
Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line
Said (J. Alfred Prufrock)
Said (Agatha Christie)
Monarch of the Sea
John Updike / Amish
I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name
Recital
Robert Sward American Heritage
Michael Benedikt / Fate in Incognito
William Harmon / Bureaucratic Limerick
Charles Simic / Watermelons
Roy Blount, Jr. / Against Broccoli
For the Record
Gryll's State
Nikki Giovanni / Master Charge Blues
Poem for Unwed Mothers
James Tate / My Great Great Etc. Uncle Patrick Henry
President Slumming
Conjuring Roethke
Kathleen Norris / Stomach
Memorandum/The Accountant's Notebook.
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More Details
Published
New York : Oxford University Press, 1979.
Format
Book
Physical Desc
1 pages, 540 pages ; 23 cm
Language
English
ISBN
9780195025095, 0195025091
Notes
General Note
Includes index.
Description
A collection of humorous poetry written by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Melville, Dickinson, Harte, Field, Frost, Sandburg, Lindsay, Aiken, MacLeish, Nash, and other well-known and lesser-known Americans.
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Citations
APA Citation, 7th Edition (Style Guide)
Harmon, W. (1979). The Oxford book of American light verse. Oxford University Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 18th Edition (Style Guide)Harmon, William, 1938-. 1979. The Oxford Book of American Light Verse. Oxford University Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 18th Edition (Style Guide)Harmon, William, 1938-. The Oxford Book of American Light Verse. Oxford University Press, 1979.
UCL Harvard Citation (Style Guide)Harmon, W. (1979). The oxford book of american light verse. New York: Oxford University Press.
MLA Citation, 9th Edition (Style Guide)Harmon, William. The Oxford Book of American Light Verse. Oxford University Press, 1979.
Note: Citations contain only title, author, edition, and publisher. Only UCL Harvard citations contain the year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy. Citation formats are based on standards as of May 2025.
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