Richard Moore on "Casey at the Bat"

The following commentary is excerpted from "How Heavy is Light?" a 1988 review published in Parnassus. To replace lost context, explanations are added, set off by square brackets.

     But [William] Harmon[, editor of The Oxford Book of American Light Verse,] should be commended for including "Casey at the Bat," bore though it may be to some, [like Russell Baker, editor of The Norton Book of Light Verse,] and for making some interesting remarks about it, which will allow me to dilate a little more on the curative effect comedy is supposed to have.  It's a wonderful poem--full of detail, humor, and drama--but I can't agree that Casey is "a disruptive braggart" and that the reader at the end is placed "in the position. . .of a cultivated citizen of a larger community given stability and justice by [Casey's] harmless punishment."  That's too quick and easy, and it passes over the underlying reality of baseball, to which the poem is meticulously faithful.  We are meant to be aware that the odds in the game always favor the pitcher over the batter and that even the greatest hitters (like Babe Ruth) strike out frequently.  Casey's "braggart" qualities are only the usual by-play of bluff and challenge between the batter and the pitcher.  The pitcher in the poem has just jeopardized his two run lead by putting two inferior men on base, and now he must face the dangerous Casey.  Casey swaggers a bit to emphasize the situation and gambles that the pitcher, flustered, will be afraid to throw him anything "good."  So he lets the first two pitches go by, guessing that they will be balls and the pitcher will then be in trouble.  But the pitcher outsmarts him, throws him two strikes, and now Casey is in trouble.  He has to swing now, and now the pitcher throws him a ball, a bad pitch at which Casey swings and misses.      But if Casey isn't the butt of the humor, who is?  There is only one obviously comic name in the poem--Mudville.  The Mudville crowd, the spectators in their excitement forget the reality of the game and produce their own absurdly artificial misery. As Harmon observes, the point of view shifts in the poem's final lines:

          Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
          The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
          And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
          But there is no joy in Mudville--mighty Casey has struck out.

But those other happy places--are they full of "cultivated" citizens who know better in their enlightened New Yorks, Washingtons, and Bostons, where everyone sees through such hype and hysteria--or are they merely other, maybe grander Mudvilles?  The poem is about America, Land of the Big Lie. We are all in Mudville--caked with it.

***

I'll make a bargain.  If the Freudians will let me have this poem[, Emily Dickinson's #520, "I started Early--Took my Dog--"], I will tell them how they can have "Casey at the Bat."  Casey at the Bat?  The proper baseball phrase is simply "at bat."  Clearly something else is meant.  It must be "Casey with the Bat" or, more likely, "Casey with his Bat."  Now if there remains any doubt about the powerful, darkly phallic significance of Casey's Bat, we need only recall that "case" is a Shakespearian code word for the female genitalia (as when Mistress Quickly speaks of "my case so openly known to the world").  Need I go on?  Clearly we subtle investigators of the twentieth century have discovered a pleasure to be had, reading poems, that can only have been guessed at in earlier ages.

the poem                                  about "Casey at the Bat"

 © 1988 Richard Moore, from Parnassus