20 APRIL 1944, Page 20

Shorter Notices

The English Book of Light Verse. Chosen by Guy Boas. (Macmillan 7s. 6d.) THERE is much humorous verse in here that the reader will he glad to find in one volume—Shakepeare's Pyramus and Thisbe; Cowley's Drinking; Prior's Epitaph about Sauntering Jack and Idle Joan ; Southey's Lodore and a wise selection from people like Gilbert, Calverley and J. K. Stephen. But this is the most one cis say in favour of the book. While it displays learning, it also shoe's a puzzling want of judgement in many of the selections and lacks any criterion. Locker Lampson and R. M. Leonard closely confined their anthologies of light verse to vers de societe and vers d'occasion. W. H. Auden widened these boundaries, almost embarrassingly, in his Oxford Book of Light Verse to include the work of any poet when he was not wearing his singing robe. But Mr. Boas does not explain himself directly—except to mention in a brief foreword that he has avoided " faded topical allusion." Nor can one discover anything in the way of a' criterion of selection by implication. He quotes Chaucer, Skelton, Donne, Wither, Herrick and Dryden and so on (his selection of Hood could have been bettered) and keeps his head until the end of the nineteenth century. Thereafter he chooses a number of contemptible humorous metricians, and a dis- proportionate number of them feeble echoers of Gilbert at his most facetious or Dobson at his daintiest. Those that do not fall into either of these categories are merely ingenious. The result is a book to make fifth form boys chuckle, but not a true anthology which should reawaken old interests and stimulate new ones.