On Light Verse

Drop a plate?
Can women learn anything from men?
A miscellany of comments:

Everybody writes poetry. Relatively few, not more than ninety percent of the population, write light verse.
     --Richard Armour, preface to Light Armour

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Light verse makes more stringent demands on the writer's technique [than high verse]. ... A concert pianist is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate.
     --Kingsley Amis, introduction to The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse

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Light verse is the comic aspect of the double-masked deity Janus. This reveals the undying fact that as the divine Vladimir (Knobby Coco) quote-quipped, "The difference between the cosmic and the comic lies in but a sibilant." It is designed to be shaped by lips, and to reside in the temple-precincts of the goddess Mnemosyne. Its fruits are laughter and recognition.
     --John Mella, editor of Light Quarterly

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(S)ome good people have had a whack at defining light verse. They include W.H. Auden and Kingsley Amis. I would be foolish to disagree with either of them on the subject of poetry, especially since they widely disagree with each other.
     --Russell Baker, introduction to The Norton Book of Light Verse

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Today comic verse is a neglected art, but there are still a good number of master practitioners around(.)
     --Dana Gioia, introduction to R.S. Gwynn's No Word of Farewell (2000)

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(L)ight verse has some heavy preoccupations. Infanticide seems an endless source of titillation for some poets... The snoring of wives, husbands, and lovers is another favorite subject. ... Few subjects produce more glee in the light versifier than death, including his own.
     --Russell Baker, introduction to The Norton Book of Light Verse

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Light Verse is not the output of poets at play, but of light-verse writers (who would not thank you today for calling them poets) at the hardest and most severely technical work known to authorship.
     --A.A. Milne, Year In, Year Out (1952) (quoted in The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse)

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Byron... is the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very seriously. ... (T)he same is true, in a minor way, of Praed, whose serious poems are as trivial as his vers de société are profound.
     --W.H. Auden, introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse

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(L)ight verse must not, cannot be difficult.
     --Kingsley Amis, introduction to The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse

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(A)n interpretation of any man's humor... is as futile as explaining a spider's web in terms of geometry.
     --E.B. White, introduction to Don Marquis' the lives and times of archy and mehitabel

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A mysterious phenomenon, toward which professional critics are usually oblivious, recurs constantly in the literary history of the United States. A man or woman, with no special talent for poetry, will put together some apparently run-of-the-mill stanzas and manage to get them printed in a newspaper or magazine. The poem is read and talked about. It is reprinted here and there. People cut it out to carry in a billfold, or pin on a bulletin board, or put under the glass top of a desk, or frame and hang on a wall. Thousands memorize it. Eventually it becomes so well known that it is hard to find a literate person who hasn't read it.
     --Martin Gardner, introduction to The Annotated Casey at the Bat

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There is, perhaps, one thing which women can profitably learn from men, a sense of play. Left to itself, the feminine imagination would get so serious that it would look down on the arts as unworthy frivolities.
     --W.H. Auden, foreword to Phyllis McGinley's Times Three