[In the following excerpt, Bakeless uses humor to criticize Guest's verse and its admirers.]

And, Mr. Sneering Critic, you certainly cannot disturb my peace of mind with your gibes and taunts unless you have my co-operation.

—From the prose writings of EDGAR A. GUEST

This article really ought to be entitled Profits from Poems, Reaching Results with Rhymes, Living on Lyrical Literature, or something like that, for Edgar A. Guest, the sweet singer of Detroit, inventor of the mass-production lyric, is the first man in the long and lively history of English literature who has succeeded in Putting Over Poetry in a really big way.

Not for nothing does Mr. Guest live in Detroit. It is even rumored that the Guestian lyrics are built on a moving belt which carries them from the Scansion and Structure Department to the Rhyme Production Department, thence to the Sunshine Department for the insertion of the "just folks" and "everyday" qualities—and finally to the Religious Department, where faith, hope and charity are mortised in, a little toning up is done with sunsets, and the whole product is inspected to make sure it is perfectly moral. After that the new lyric can be run out of the factory on its own wheels and is ready for shipment, f.o.b. Detroit, terms net cash.

Only two modern poets make a living out of poetry. The other one is Alfred Noyes, who also resembles Mr. Guest in being of English birth. Otherwise they are very different. Mr. Guest came to our shores at an early age, went straight west to Detroit, and grew up with the country and Henry Ford. Alfred Noyes came later in life, lingered in the academic shades of the effete East, returned to the tyrannous monarchy of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas—and now look at him!

In the ecstatic language of Messrs. Reilly and Lee, who seem to admire the Guestian works with that glad, free sincerity which is so characteristic of publishers when they are speaking of the genius that they nurture and pay royalties:

Mr. Guest speaks to everyday people on everyday themes in everyday language in the columns of more than two hundred American newspapers, morning or evening. His Books of Verse [don't blame me for the capitals] are read in a million American homes. His voice is heard from the speaker's platform, over the radio or on the phonograph every day in the year.

Indeed, one indignant lover of poetry (not the Guestian variety) once protested in the columns of Miss Harriet Monroe's little magazine of verse, that the only way to escape him was to smash the radio. Escape, alas, is not so easy. One would also have to stop the morning paper, censor the sermon before going to church, and sedulously avoid Rotarían luncheons and Chamber of Commerce banquets. You cannot say that about Alfred Noyes—indeed, you cannot say it about far greater poets. But you can say it about Edgar A. Guest, the unlaureled laureate of the illiterate, the beloved, the admired, the applauded, the highly paid, and the generally agreed with—in short, Mr. Edgar A. Guest, of 17471 Hamilton Drive, Detroit.

THE story of Edgar A. Guest is the story of a poor boy who felt the call to Service, the urge to Higher Things. He said to himself:

Brave youth must rise! Each Age demands
Clear brains, strong hearts and willing hands.
There is no limit placed on fame;
Tis something any boy can claim.
Hold fast! Work hard, be strong, be true—
The future keeps a place for you! . . .

Poor boys with glory shall be crowned,
And men shall pass their stories round.
This great success which thrills you through
Tomorrow may belong to you.

It was even so. Within a few years he had taken the Kingdom of Rotararia by storm.

Edgar A. Guest was born on August 20, 1881, the son of Edwin and Julia Wayne Guest. His parents brought him to the land that he was subsequently to celebrate in song, at the age of nine. They settled in Detroit, and within six months knew everybody on the block—not exactly an English way of doing things.

In fact it leads one to suspect that perhaps the emphasis on the personal element in much of Guest's later work may be just the result of English reserve trying hard to be American—and overdoing it.

He was educated in the grammar schools and high school of Detroit. He never went to college—like Shakespeare. His learning, rather, was in the busy marts of men, at the communing places of the active, directing brains, the stamping ground of strong, silent men, the meeting place folks, plain, everyday people—in short he was the soda-jerker at Doty's drugstore, Sibley and Clifford Streets, Detroit. But not for long. And so—

He risked for much, and risking, knew
What failure meant.
His all into the game he threw,
And as it went,
He stood prepared to pay the cost
And not to whimper when he lost.

But the harsher trials were spared him. He soon had the job of office boy in the business department of the Detroit Free Press; again like Shakespeare, you see, who, legend avers, once held horses outside the theatre. The budding bard can't hold horses in Detroit. The next best thing is to be office boy in the busy marts of trade. It leads to poetic heights just the same.

It is recorded that Edgar A. Guest was an earnest office boy. He said to himself:

Two ways there are for youth to go, and
one is gay with song;
The other calls for earnest men and
rugged hearts and strong.
Bewitching sirens lure the feet
Of those who sigh for pleasures sweet,
But when the purse is empty, boy, in
scorn they pass you by;
'Tis time enough to dance and sing
When you have done some useful thing,
And youth must strike for goals afar
which old men dare not try.

Young Edgar struck for goals afar, and within two years he had advanced upstairs to be office boy in the editorial department.

It is not known that he washed the windows or that he swept the floor or that he polished up the handle on the big front door. It is not even known whether the big front door of the Detroit Free Press, at that early date, had a handle that required polishing. But young Edgar A. Guest did the next best thing. He said to himself:

For the many, more's the pity,
Seem to like to drift along.
But the steeps that call for courage
And the task that's hard to do,
In the end result in glory
For the never-wavering few.

In practically no time he was exchange editor of the Detroit Free Press!

Mr. R. Marshall, author of A Little Book About the Poet of the Plain People, has hymned the event in poetic prose: "Across the desk of the exchange editor sweeps the flood of the world's opinion, the sum total of the world's woe, the tinkling brooks of the world's joys. To him come the banker and the burglar, the women of high and low degree. To him come the poet and the plunderer, musicians and murderers, jokesmiths and junkers, prophets and perjurers. It is he who sees history in the making—to him is shown the panorama of the world's fight in the midst of the fighting."

Mr. Guest became a naturalized American citizen in 1902, he married a Detroit girl in 1906, his son was born in 1912, and his daughter in 1922. Such was the genesis of America's most famous home, whose inmost privacies have since been publicized in thousands of newspaper and magazine columns. The New Baby in Our Home was written and published about the time the new baby was a year old. Mr. Guest has even told in a magazine article, just "What I Shall Teach Bud and Janet about Marriage." He has explained for a woman's magazine why "My Youngsters Don't Worry Me," besides providing detailed descriptions of the Guest backyard and the Guest neighbors, all mentioned by name.

Before long, Mr. Guest became police reporter for the Free Press. His official biographer has written another exquisite prose romance about what the inside of a Detroit police station was really like in those days, a place where the reporter "plays dominoes with the night chief when they're both doing 'the dog watch' in the small hours of the morning." Apparently a nice place for mother to do her knitting.

Then came the transformation. Out of the earnest office boy, the exchange editor afire with the lust for Service, and out of the pure-minded police reporter, emerged the gifted columnist and poet. Eddie Guest took charge of a daily column, which was appropriately named "Chaff." But the wind did not blow it away. Ever since there has been something or other of Eddie Guest's on the editorial page of the Free Press; though the "Chaff," following excellent precedent, has long since been made into breakfast food and is now called "Edgar A. Guest's Breakfast Table Chat."

But, long ere this, had dawned the light of a new day. By 1910, Edgar A. Guest had written 3,650 poems. Most versifiers become impatient for the dignity of cloth bindings long before that, but they have not the Guestian spirit of Service to sustain them. When at length even he aspired to book publication, his brother Harry set the type for Home Rhymes in the attic. An edition of 800 was printed. A single copy of this home-made first edition would be a notable addition to any collection of Americana, but copies are almost undiscoverable today.

One volume, however, is no Aristotelian eatharsis for a man who can write more than three thousand poems before thirty. Within two years there were more than 730 new poems, and another volume had to be printed, appropriately titled Just Glad Things. Passed another two years and there was born another book, Breakfast Table Chat. It, too, was about to be privately printed when the Rotary Club of Detroit decided that the poetry of Edgar A. Guest was simply swell, besides being literary and high class and bursting with the spirit of Service. They published the new book for him, in an edition of 3,500 copies.

His first commercial publication was A Heap o' Livin', named from one of his most famous poems, "It Takes a Heap o' Livin' t' Make a House a Home." This book was published in 1916. Its far from subtle rhythms and even less subtle thought made an instantaneous hit. Service, home, mother, and the little ones, dogs, lilies, and the ol swimmin' hole, embalmed in iron-clad iambics were precisely what the great throbbing heart of the plain folksy people yearned for. In ten years they bought a quarter of a million copies. In the meantime, the mills of Guest ground on, and they ground exceeding thin. The result was eight more books of verse—a total of nine in a decade, all of which sold and sold and sold. A first edition of 50,000 copies for a Guest book of verses is now regarded as ridiculously conservative. A good many of these are given away as gift books, for which purpose they are brought out in seven different bindings, four with an "art box."

When the World War came, Mr. Guest sprang to the defense of the Detroit front with Over Here, since republished as Poems of Patriotism. He swallowed, and helped others to swallow, a vast dose of war-time propaganda:

Old women pierced by bayonets grim
And babies slaughtered for a whim,
Cathedrals made the sport of shells,
No mercy, even for a child,
As though the imps of all the hells
Were crazed with drink and running wild.

A kind of versified Bryce report.

The book was full of the clichés of battle poetry, as the earlier books had' been full of clichés about home and mother. It is curious to reflect that those years which tried the souls of all the world—which called forth the best work of Housman, Brooke, Seeger, Kilmer, and Sassoon—meant to the bard of Detroit merely lines about "bloodstained tyrants," "worn warriors," "mountain peaks . . . freedom shrieks," "battling for the right . . . cruel might," "lead of shame . . . cannons flame," "war's alarms . . . call to arms."

The book reached its depth of unreality in the sage asseveration that "no soldier will complain." The man who wrote that doesn't know soldiers. From Caesar's legionaries to Napoleon's "Grognards," and on down to the last scuffle in North Africa, every good soldier has at all times in all armies "groused" to high heaven in all moods and tenses, with expletives thrown in.

The chorus of praise which Mr. Guest's mass of versified platitudes has elicited—particularly from the clergy—is beyond belief. It is rather the fashion to compare Guest with Burns, neglecting the fact that Burns wrote as graceful and delicately varied lyric verse as has ever been written in English, while the prosody of Edgar A. Guest is a wooden succession of monotonous iambics.

Yet, "he is the Burns of America," observes that distinguished critic, the Grand Prelate of the Knights Templar of Indiana. Says another clerical enthusiast: "If Robert Burns sang at times with more rhythmic beauty and smoother cadence, there shines through the crystalline character of Edgar A. Guest an unsullied sincerity born of purity of heart such as is pathetically lacking in the poet from Scotia's hills. .. . He sees God everywhere, with an eye which gleams with 'the light of faith.' He sees God in friendship and he sees Him in the trees; he sees Him in the hollyhocks 'swaying in the breeze;' he sees Him in the 'rippling brooks' and in 'blue skies overhead;' he sees Him in the robins and in 'roses white and red.' His faith is founded on the years and all that he has seen; something of God's he's looked upon no matter where he's been."

Which simply means that a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church is so mixed up in a Guestian lyric enthusiasm that he has mistaken the simplest pantheism for orthodox Christianity. Other parsons are quite as ludicrous in their praises of Guest's verse.

"He is trying with all his heart and soul to be a good picture of Jesus Christ and get us all better acquainted with the Sweet Father," murmurs the rector of an Episcopal Church in Detroit. "Guest's poems are singing a needed challenge 'round the family fireside," declares a shepherd of souls in Indianapolis. Heaven knows what that means.

"Our night with him was one of happiness and uplift," murmurs a Pittsburgh parson, without the ghost of a smile. Guest's, says no less a personage than a Methodist District Superintendent, is "a blessed ministry of laughter, love, and song."

One gasps as one reads the astounding array of bad taste that has been published as Edgar A. Guest: Some Appreciations of the Man and his Work, by his Friends of the Pulpit. One wonders how any men who must daily read the austere magnificence of the English Bible can honestly applaud the jingle-jangle of Guest's verse. It is appalling to think that men presumably familiar with the eternal human truths can confuse them with the ephemeral truisms of the Detroit seer.

It was the Rev. Phillips Endecott Osgood, rector of St. Marks, Minneapolis, who once and for all explained the hold that Guest's verse has on the man in the street and his children in the fifth grade. Guest expresses, he said, "an average man's conclusions crystallized from life as it is." Or, as the president of a denominational university puts it: "He does not wear long hair; he dresses after the approved style of civilization [i.e., Detroit, Michigan]; he has none of the picturesque vices of the old-fashioned writing man [a roué, for example, like Tennyson]; and he does not entertain eccentric views about any of the big questions of life."

Mr. Guest's verse is without beauty, distinction, or honest intellectual content. He apparently has no idea of metrical substitutions or the use of the run-over line—what the French prosodists call enjambement. As a result, the monotonous humdrum of his verse is enough to madden a trained ear. His only variation is an occasional inversion of word order of the simplest kind, which usually makes the "poem" worse. A few years ago, when he was running a Sunday department called Edgar A. Guest's Young Verse Writers' Corner—with his own autographed works as prizes—a nine-year-old in Bay City, Michigan, sent in these simple little lines:

If I were a singer
I would sing a bonny song,
And all those who stopped to listen
Would be happy all day long.

Now that, for a nine-year-old, isn't bad. At least it has freshness and simplicity, and the naïve charm of childhood, even if it does not bear comparison with the juvenile lyrics of Chatterton.

But Edgar A. Guest revamped it relentlessly into his own tom-tom beat. He advised the child to write:

If 1 were a singer
I'd sing a bonny song,
And all who stopped to hear
Would happy be, day-long!

A jingle as monotonous and mechanical as the rattle of a Ford car.

But Mr. Guest is popular, not in spite of the machinemade quality of his verse but because of it. He is also popular because he re-enforces the prejudices and "beliefs" of the average man. His subjects are the conventional sentimentalities—he must have written at least a dozen "poems" on mother love—and the wish-fulfilments, defense-mechanisms, baseless optimisms, and success motifs which constitute nine-tenths of the after-dinner oratory of North America.

The "mother" poems are the worst. One of this year's crop concludes:

Though broken promises destroyed
The faith of others all,
With help she ran unto the man
Whene'er she heard him call.

Friends oft divide and pride forgets
The ones it climbs above,
But there's no sin man wallows in
Can change a mother's love.

Bad as this is, Mr. Guest reached the ultimate in one called, "Weaning the Baby," which reaches its climax thus:

No more upon her gentle breast
That little face may lie,
No more that little nose be pressed
Against her food supply.

When one considers the nature of the subject, the banality of the verse seems debasing as only shoddy art can be. Yet the offense to good taste in much of Mr. Guest's writing is not the head and front of his offending. For twenty years he has unconsciously been drumming into the average heads of average American voters the most dangerous belief that a great nation can entertain: Its own flawlessness. Smug self-satisfaction is more fatal to democracy than any number of amateur Machiavellis in Moscow.

It is comforting to add that not all criticism has been so sugary as that of the clerics whom I have quoted. Occasionally, Mr. Guest gets precisely what is coming to him. Benjamin de Casséres, writing in the American Mercury, once summed him up as "the Cerberus that guards us against the great Blond Beast, against the sex-prickings of jazz, against the Seven Deadly Pleasures, . . . the upsprung backbone of middle-class morality."

But such are the views of the literati, and as every honest yokel knows, the literati are no better than they should be. They did not prevent the Michigan Legislature, in 1925, from passing a bill providing for a poet laureate—who, as every one knew, was destined to be Edgar A. Guest. That inconsiderable fellow, Robert Frost, was Fellow in Letters at the University of Michigan at the time, but as his poems don't even rhyme, the Legislature did not consider him.

On the second day of March, in that memorable year, the Hon. Chester M. Howell, of Saginaw, introduced "a bill to provide for the appointment of a poet laureate of the State of Michigan." It was considered in Committee of the Whole—along with a bill "to fix the weight per bushel of certain vegetables," and another enactment "to provide that the term 'live stock' shall include poultry."

After one failure, the bill passed the House by 82 to 5, and the Michigan legislators turned in relief to the question of "spearing red horse, suckers, and mullet in the Clinton and Belle Rivers." By April it looked as if Michigan were destined to be the only state in the Union with an official laureate all its own; for the Senate also passed the bill and returned it to the House—together with another "to permit the taking of speckled bass and crappies from certain waters of Muskegon County."

But at this interesting juncture, up in gubernatorial wrath rose the Honorable Alex J. Groesbeck, Governor of Michigan. He vetoed the bill on the ground that "no compensation seems to have been provided for the Poet Laureate in the event of his appointment, and I can scarcely conceive of one such, serving without a salary. At least this is my understanding of this monarchial [sic] job." Considering the fact that the official payment of the British poet laureate has for centuries been a generous measure of wine, this was indeed a difficulty. Besides, argued Governor Groesbeck: "Speaking more seriously, as the saying goes, such an office has no place in a Republican form of government and for this reason I withhold my approval."