I can agree with Milne that an essential part of 'light verse' is that it treats the craft of poetry as if it were merely an incidental. But I don't think that the craft which is treated in so cavalier a fashion need be 'exact laws of rhythm and metre'. Eliots' Mr. Mistoffelees doesn't quite go as far as modernist mixed metres, but it drifts a long way from what were traditional ideas of strict metre at the time. (In Mr. Mistoffelees Eliot perhaps isn't as modern as Eliot, but he probably is as modern as James Thomson). Ian Hamilton Finlay's Orcadian poems are clearly modernist from a technical point of view, but I think it would be difficult to call them 'serious' poems. (I think from certain points of view they are great poems).
I am flummoxed by Milne's suggestion that taking light verse seriously is a modern thing (nineteenth century or later).
I seem to have started this fracas by comparing a rather fine posting by Holly to Catullus 3. In the Catullus poem the Angel of Death comes for a pet sparrow, and Catullus gives her a good telling off. I don't think it is a serious poem, I also think it is not an unserious poem. I think Catullus wants us not to know whether he has his tongue in his cheek or not.
Catullus 13 is much the same. The first two lines sound as if we will get a poem about the Good Old Days, and about how everybody was happy even though they were poor when we were all True Romans. Then we get some stuff about how expensive courtesans are these days, and what sounds like a ferociously dirty joke about the Goddess of Love turning you into a giant nose.
I think of light verse as verse where we are uncertain whether the poet is being earnest in what he says; and perhaps also uncertain as to whether he knows (or cares). I think it is very, very old - and has had some truly great practitioners.
I think Dante is incapable of being light; I think Chaucer does it easily. I think A Midsummer Nights Dream is a light play - and one of Shakespeare's greatest.
And - since it would be inappropriate to make an entirely serious posting about light verse - I also think that In Memoriam and The Hunting of the Snark essentially treat the same subject matter, and from very similar viewpoints. In Memoriam contemplates the death of a loved one - and the consolations of a general faith in Providence - seriously; The Hunting of the Snark takes the same topics, but deals with them as if death and grief were things which happen to everybody - which makes them a bit of a joke really.
I think the Snark is one of the great English poems about how we face our mortality.
I also think it is light verse.
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