He was easily the best-knownand possibly the bestAmerican practitioner of a subtle art that is always more serious than it seems: the writing of light verse. As he observed in one of his last poems: "In chaos sublunary/What remains constant but buffoonery?"
He had few peers when it came to observing human foibles with a kind of wry delight, and he was undoubted master of the unique form that he devised: the line that runs on and on, metric foot after metric foot, only to snap to an end with an outrageously contrived rhyme...
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