The "Divine Chit-Chat" of Cowper’s The Task

  

William Cowper by George Romney

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line number in parentheses.

 

 

     R. W. had been at the center of the New York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties.  When I knew him decades later, he habitually referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically casual terms.  “We were just playing around.”  “Professors come asking me questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.”  “We did things just for the hell of it.”  Though earlier versions of Romanticism had exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.

     One effect of this pose is to foreground the value of the aesthetic.  If a work of art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing the same value in  milder terms --  amusing, or stimulating, or simply diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become incidental or irrelevant.  The poem or play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant manner.

      This stance is by no means novel.  Catullus calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests, idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”  A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born, according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well have been a telephone call to a friend.

     The eighteenth century is known for neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity.  The era celebrated the imitation of Latin models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The fashion of posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode, conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2]  The turn away from grand themes and settings is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’ Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden).  Each of these is structured with a casual colloquialism, as though in conversation. 

     William Cowper’s The Task,  called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table.  The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note. 

 

[“The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject.  He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]

 

The Task is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at dancing, music, or witty repartee.  While Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next with no appearance of design. 

     The author’s intentionality is evident in the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the poem [7].  For instance, apart from calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring” (III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of “roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697).  So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is freestyling, to use a contemporary term.

    in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings. 

 

Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

 (I, 150-153) 

.     The first transition following the opening history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of  topic.  The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not associated with sofas.  That article of furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he addresses are physically active. 

 

The SOFA suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb

Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes . . .

(I, 106-110)

 

     After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend.  Though it is unclear how the discovery is linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where he  might find “the poet’s treasure, silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236). 

     This particular dream is short-lived, however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor

“wretch” (I, 239) whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).  Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical knottiness becomes ornamental.

 

Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet

These chesnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And though himself so polish'd, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

 (262-265)

 

The final line is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.

     Rambling on in the present tense, he then happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.”  (I, 277)  This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284).  The faintly self-mocking parallel with the poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be remembered is unmistakable.

     Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed.  The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils. 

 

So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkning and enlightning, as the leaves

Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.

                                                            (345-349)

 

      Though this survey has covered only half the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not change.  To continue detailing his divagations would be to belabor the point.  Cowper goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering mental associative streams.  Like a scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and he drifts freely from one to the next.  His many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner. 

     This offhand procedure is not itself vacant of meaning.  By suggesting that anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience is equally profound.  If he risks the appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life to be poetry.  His assertively non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value.  Cowper does have preferences and values, and he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.

 

  

 

1.  Silence.

 

2.  Cowley was followed in this practice by Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.  Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions. 

 

3.  Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.

 

4. Letter to Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.

 

5.  Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.

 

6.  Cowper was a close friend of John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace.”

 

7.  For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1972).  Bentman traces a similar use of “wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.

Addison’s Cato and Liberty

 

George Cruikshank, "John Kemble in the role of Cato" (1816)

 

Citations of the play in parentheses refer to the 2004 edition edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin.  Numbers in  brackets indicate endnotes.

  

     This year, when the American election presents a choice between an outright fascist dictatorship under the most absurd of “strong men” and maintaining our longstanding bourgeois democracy, battered and compromised as it has been from the start by big money men, political dramas of the past seem reanimated with relevance.  I recently watched Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty with its neatly ironic plot of a cynical politician who succeeds only as long as he is corrupt.  A similar theme underlies Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men.  Willie Stark’s demagoguery, while in ways more benevolent than the current Republican Party, pointed at the country’s vulnerability to a demagogue. [1] 

     I picked up Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) thinking that his hero might offer an appropriate response to tyrannical leaders and that his Caesar might have something in common with the outlandish television performer and would-be caudillo who has mesmerized a third of the electorate.  In fact, this play, though rarely read and even more rarely performed, was once not only extremely popular, but more closely intertwined with American history and ideals than, perhaps, any other work of literature.

     Current neglect of the play is unsurprising.  While Addison’s journalistic essays were lively and colloquial, his drama is icily formal and abstract, the pentameters rolling like a slow but regular drum set loop.  A modern critic states as a matter of fact that “the literary merits of the work no longer attract appreciative comment.” [2]  Lacking the Enlightenment era’s love for the fresh idea of liberty, today’s readers are likely to yawn at Addison’s verse which is more reminiscent of Corneille and Racine than other English poets.  Observance of the “unities” and a lofty theme are no longer sufficient to impress readers or viewers.

     The characters speak in generalities and platitudes.  Cato’s initial determination and Lucius’ concluding moralizing are sufficient examples of this pervasive abstraction.    

 

Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal

Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason”

True fortitude is seen in great exploits

That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides,

All else is towering phrensy and distraction   

                                                            (II, I, 43-47)

               From hence, let fierce contending nations know

What dire effects from civil discord flow,

‘Tis this that shakes our country with alarms

And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,

Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,

And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.

(V, iv, 108-112)

 

Even the loves of Marcia and Juba, Portius and Lucia are subordinated to the grand political and philosophical themes of the play.  When Juba attempts to make love to Cato’ daughter Marcia by declaring the intention to emulate her father, she reproves him, saying the national crisis renders such personal goals as love inappropriate.

 

 

Juba: That Juba might deserve thy pious cares,

I’ll gaze forever on thy godlike father,

Transplanting one by one, into my life

His bright perfections, till I shine like him.

 

Marcia: My father never, at a time like this

Would lay out his great soul in words, and waste

Such precious moments.

(I, v, 18-24)  

  

     Meanwhile, Lucia prefers Portius specifically because Marcus is too passionate, “overwarm” (I, vi, 49).  The very signs of deep passion idealized in other drama are for Addison signs of weakness, making him “disfigur’d” (III, ii, 8). 

 

He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies:

His passions and his virturs lie confus’d.

(III, ii, 5-6)

 

Indeed, many critics including Voltaire, found the love scenes altogether out of place.  Voltaire praised the play as a whole, calling it the first “regular tragedy in English,” infused with “a spirit of elegance through every part,” yet he (inconsistently) found it marred “by a dull love plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.”  In 1764 an edition was printed with a Latin translation the play “without the love scenes” [3].

     The ill fit of a romantic story in a story glorifying Cato is consistent with the hero’s reputation as a Stoic hero.  Washington himself received an education more vocational than Classical, but had some familiarity and sympathy with Stoicism which was in his day, as in ours, in the air, [4] though sometimes these more modern Stoicisms have little in common with Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.  Cato himself left no philosophic writings, yet he became widely regarded as an exemplary Stoic, particularly in  light of his suicide. [5]

     The figure of Cato was already well-known at the start of the eighteenth century primarily from his biography in Plutarch, but Addison’s immensely popular play increased his reputation.  From the day of its opening Cato was “an immediate, a sensational success” and the play became one of the most frequently performed of the century, running through twenty-six English editions in print during the 1700s. [6]  In the colonies that were to rebel, productions were mounted in many cities, including Charleston in 1736, New York in 1750, Philadelphia in 1759, Providence in 1762, and, following the outbreak of hostilities, in Boston and Portsmouth in 1778. [7] 

     Addison had himself been an active Whig politician, seeking to strengthen the powers of Parliament.  He died well before the conflicts between the British and their American cousins came to a head, but the play was thoroughly pollical from the start.  In a remarkable and unlikely circumstance Frederick, Prince of Wales, produced the play privately at Leicester House in London to oppose the authoritarian tendencies of his own father George II.  Among the performers was Frederick’s son, the future George III to whom was given a new prologue including the lines 1749 to promote his own support for English liberty against the supposed tyranny of his father, George II of Great Britain. The cast featured four of Frederick's children, including the future George III, the bête noire of the American colonists, who spoke a specially-written prologue, which included the line "What, tho' a boy? it may with pride be said / A boy in England born, in England bred,” drawing attention to George II's birth in Hanover, Germany. 

     During the winter of 1778-1779 the Continental Army camped at Valley Forge, a season that has become legendary for the soldiers’ hardships.  After the harsh winter Washington flouted the congressional ban on theater (as well as “every species of extravagance and dissipation” [8]) and arranged for a production of Addison’s play before “a very numerous and splendid audience” [9] including his comrades-in-arms.   

Horatio Greenough's statue of Washington (1832)

     Cato was not only Washington’s favorite play.  It had so deeply entered the consciousness of American patriots that its words seem clearly to have shaped the best-known lines associated with the Revolution. [10]  For instance, Patrick Henry's famous line, reported in 1817 as the dramatic conclusion to a 1775 speech to the Second Virginia Convention "Give me liberty, or give me death!" restates, with dramatic compression, the sentiment of the play’s "It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death." (IV, iv, 84)  Nathan Hale’s last words, according to the account of British captain John Montresor who was present, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" resembles "What a pity it is/That we can die but once to serve our country." (IV, iv, 80-81)

     The extent to which Addison’s play had permeated American consciousness is clear from the numerous other citations and rephrasings of its lines in the writing of American revolutionaries.  The speech in which Portius says “Tis not in mortals to command success,/ But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it” (I, 2, 43-44) underlies passages in a letter from George Washington to Benedict Arnold dated December 5, 1775, a letter from Washington to Nicholas Cooke dated October 29, 1775, and a letter from John Adams to his wife of February 18, 1776.  Charles Thomson, in a November 1, 1774 letter to Benjamin Franklin, declared himself “ready to ask, with the poet, ‘Are there not some chosen thunders in the stores of heaven armed with uncommon wrath to blast those Men,’ who by their cursed schemes of policy are dragging friends and brothers into the horrors of civil War and involving their country in ruin?” (the quotation is a paraphrase of I, 1, 21–4).  These few examples in which his influence has been noted might be multiplied, and doubtless many reminiscences of the language of the play have not attracted the attention of historians. [11]

     Surely a part what made this play a sensation in the eighteenth century was the neo-Classical taste of the age which fancied high ideals and found abstractions more mighty than particulars.  While no one considered reinstating the old Roman (and Japanese) custom of honorable suicide, Britons and Americans alike admired the frugality, self-control, and dignity of the Stoic pose and cast their leaders in this mold.  The artificiality of the style reinforced what was seen as strength of character in a hero’s strong will. 

      In terms of content, both Old and New World felt the excitement of the fading of the old feudal absolute monarchy and the advent of emerging ideas of liberty and capitalism.  The movement forward, in which the United States played a critical role, inspiring patriots in France, Poland, and elsewhere for generations to come, must have been intoxicating at its outset.   Embodied in texts like Addison’s Cato, the excitement of these new ideas permeated the culture in a way that no play could do today. 

     What art remains from the movement against the Vietnam War?  How many people remember The Teeth Mother Naked at Last?  Surely no one would look at MacBird! today.   Even Country Joe’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" is a relic that requires footnotes for people younger than I.  Literary savants know the poets of World War I, but they were never popular in the way that Cato was.  A similar penetration of American culture could probably be achieved today only by a television series.  

     Today we like Cato face the threat of tyranny, but death and submission are not the only choices.  Perhaps an oblique approach to onetime ideals of the country’s founders through Addison’s play can provide a livelier sense of how inspiring self-government once seemed before its slogans became patriotic cliches, employed as often by the enemies of liberty as by friends.   

    

 

 

1.  Rossen had himself undergone historical trials.  Originally an uncooperative witness of the HUAC, he was blacklisted and eventually, like Elia Kazan, named names in order to resume work in Hollywood. 

2.  M. M. Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” The Review of English Studies, Volume XVII, Issue 66, May 1966,

3.  Voltaire, Letters on the English, Letter XVIII, “On Tragedy.”  For a full account see Lisa A. Freeman, “What's Love Got to Do with Addison's "Cato"?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1999), pp. 463-482.

4.  See H. C. Montgomery, “Washington the Stoic,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Mar., 1936).  Montogomery says he acquired information about Stoicism from his friends the Fairfaxes and quotes the statement in Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Young George Washington that Washington had an English outline of Seneca “the mere chapter headings are the moral axioms that Washinton followed through life.

5.  His semi-ascetic ways such as going barefoot and wearing a toga without a tunic fit well with Stoicism’s recommended abstemiousness.  Fred K. Drogula, Cato the Younger: life and death at the end of the Roman republic (2019) argues that he may have seen himself instead as representative of Roman mos maiorum rather than as a Stoic. 

6.  See Iskra Fileva, “Stoicism as a Fad and a Philosophy,” Psychology Today, posted August 4, 2022 at  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202208/stoicism-fad-and-philosophy.  Fileva notes that in 2019 the word Stoic was used more times than in any earlier year in  history.  She lists a few of the best-selling self-help books claiming to represent Stoic ideas: The Power of Stoicism; The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism; Mastering the Stoic Way of Life; 5-Minute Stoicism Journal, and many others.

7.  Robert M. Keller, compiler, Performance Notices in The Colonial Music Institute database, http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/index.htm.

8.  The ban included “all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shows , plays and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”  See Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37.

9.  Mark Evans Bryan, "'Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010). 

10.  I provide no citation as these striking parallels have been noted by many historians. 

11.  A great many other echoes of the language of Addison’s play have been noted as well.  Among the many other correspondences between passages in Addison’s play and the literature of the American Revolution are Jonathan Mitchel Sewall’s new epilogue for the play (1778) which explicitly identified Cato with Washington, Juba with Lafayette, and Caesar with King George and included these lines.

Our senate, too, the same bold deed has done,

And for a Cato, arm’’d a WASHINGTON!

A chief in all the ways of battle skill’’d

Great in the council, glorious in the field! (25-28)

What Poetry Is Not

 

Poetry is not instructive.

     Poetry does not teach people wisdom; it offers no pointers toward enlightenment, no aid to being more moral or guidance on how to vote.  Artists have no privileged access to truth.  The apparent insights the reader may gain from a story or poem are generated by recognition of another take on reality, another vision, not necessarily sager but different from one’s own and thus broadening.  A poet need not be wise; his professional skill is limited to the manipulation of words and symbols made of words.  The historic claim that art teaches truths arose from its central role since archaic times in conveying received ideas like those implied by myth, ritual, and religion, and affirming people’s beliefs about politics and behavior in general.  In its inverted modern version, art’s critical role comes to the fore, exposing contradictions and opening the way for change.  Art’s reputation for teaching its audience one way or another has been heightened by a moralistic suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure in the contemplation of beauty for its own sake.

 

Poetry is not sincere.

     Poetry is always in the voice of a persona, always an artifice.  The pose of speaking directly from the heart is rhetorical as are other fictions.  Every lyric is not the author’s cri de coeur but rather a hypothetical statement of what some speaker might one day have said.  This does not contradict the fact that, coincidentally, the statement on the page may correspond closely to the conscious sentiment of its writer, but this is accidental and unrelated to the value of what is said.  In fact, creativity is more foregrounded in the depiction of attitudes that are not the author’s own, just as one is obliged as a reader to exercise greater imagination in identifying with fictional characters with views unlike one’s own.  Sincerity, while doubtless valuable in personal relationships, has no place in art.

 

Poetry is not therapeutic.

     The aim of a poem qua poem is not to work through personal experiences, neither to overcome grief nor, for that matter, to celebrate a joyful event.  The author’s state of mind, whether it be disturbed or serene has no relation to the success of the work of art.  Likewise, the reader’s feeling better or worse after reading has no aesthetic value.  When someone says a poem is inspired by a bout with disease or by a newly adopted child, the reader must be wary, though such an origin has, in fact, neither positive nor negative implications for the value of the work.  Any therapeutic (or other utilitarian) use for either a producer or consumer of art is entirely incidental.  Art is the playful manipulation of symbols; it is not designed to solve the problems of either creators or consumers. 

 

Poetry is not (in general) obscure.

     The qualification in this statement arises from the fact that, whereas in other discourses lucidity is the highest value, poetry is often more complex.  Some verse has always depended on subcultural knowledge, whether academic and courtly or based in folkways, rural or urban.  The pleasure of some literary work, too, derives, like that of riddles and puzzles, from the need for energetic decoding.  Still, most poetry is intelligible for any attentive reader.  With poetry’s exile from the center of the majority of  people’s artistic experience after the turn of the twentieth century, certain poets, such as Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, indeed reacted by reveling in the density of their texts, but in earlier times no one complained that poetry was difficult to understand.  Nonetheless, since a significant amount of human experience is mysterious, contradictory, ambiguous, or irrational, these characteristics are replicated in many poems.  If a sentiment is reducible to a simple paraphrase, after all, there is no excuse for casting it in artistic form.  In art “meaning” is overappreciated in any event; in only a minority of cases does “meaning” provide the primary value of a work.

 

Poetry is not a specialized taste. 

     Every culture on earth, including those which have no written language, has poetry, often in genres similar of those of technologically advanced societies.  Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare were consumed by everyone.  Popular genres such as folksong and broadsheet verses among the uneducated and parlor poetry for the middle classes flourished until very recently.  All young children relish nursery rhymes and virtually all adults are moved by popular songs.    Poetry appears today still in advertising jingles and the word-play of graffiti, sound bites, jokes, and bumper stickers.  Dexterity in the manipulation of symbolic materials is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species.  It is only natural that we should all enjoy practicing this skill.