Collected Works (Edgar A. Guest)

Edgar Guest was a newspaper poet. Born in Birmingham, England, he emigrated to Detroit as a boy, was hired as a copy boy at the Detroit Free Press in 1895 and stayed with the paper for something like sixty-five years, producing roughly 11,000 short poems that ran in around 300 syndicated newspapers and later on radio and television. A collected Guest is therefore a gathering of daily newspaper verse rather than a book conceived as a book: plain, rhymed, metrically regular poems about home, work, children, duty and getting on with it.

He is worth being straight about. Guest was probably the most widely read poet in America in his lifetime and has been dismissed by literary critics for just as long as sentimental doggerel — Dorothy Parker’s line about him is the famous dismissal. His presence on a citizen-forming list is a claim about the popular, domestic register of verse rather than about literary standing, and reading him tells you a great deal about what ordinary early-twentieth-century Americans read and wanted poetry to do.

Context: Listed under Poetry in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 900 — the lowest reading level of any poetry entry in the adult band, which is consistent with what the verse is for.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Edgar A. Guest — the author.
• Journalism — the trade the poems were written inside; they are newspaper copy before they are books.
• Poetry — the form.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea, here in its most popular and least literary register.