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Amis includes a respectable swatch of Jonathan Swift speculating on his coming demise and of T.S. Eliot musing on cats ("Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,/ There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity"). John Betjeman, England's reigning poet laureate, displays a light touch at vers de société; Robert Graves is captured in several nonmythic moods. A couple of songs by Nöel Coward read less jauntily than they sing. Auden the anthologist did not let Auden the splendid comic poet into his book. Amis generously corrects this blunder.
But the leading lights of Amis' collection are frequently less than well known. One of the book's funniest poems, period, is an ironic encomium to an organ grinder by C.S. Calverley (1831-84). A typical stanza:
Tell me by what art thou bindest On thy feet those ancient shoon: Tell me, Grinder, if thou grindest Always, always out of tune.
Desmond Skirrow (1924-76) uses but twelve well-chosen words in Ode on a Grecian Urn summarized:
Gods chase Round vase. What say? What play? Don't know. Nice, though.
Amis also shows a knack for presenting familiar poets in unfamiliar guises. He dutifully includes not only Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky but also a dead-on parody of Hiawatha: ("From his shoulder Hiawatha/ Took the camera of rosewood—/ Made of sliding, folding rosewood ..."). A.E. Housman's familiar Hellenic manner is turned inside out in his version of a hilariously mistranslated Greek tragedy: "O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots/ Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom/ Whence by what way how purposed art thou come..."
Amis' editorial quirkiness digs up much of value that would otherwise have stayed buried. But there is madness in his method. He is happiest being outrageous, and the best way to do that in his native England is to mock liberal pieties. Amis' convincing impersonation of a Colonel Blimp drifting rightward obliges him to include several mediocre poetic slaps at the left that simply do not meet his own standards. He gives space to a few Americans, including Bret Harte, Robert Frost, Peter de Vries and the late Phyllis McGinley. But he omits John Updike, who, when he chooses to be, is probably the best writer of light verse alive.
Given the speed with which Oxford anthologies become holy writ, Amis' peculiarities are regrettable. It is impossible, though, to pull a long face at his collection. The poems he assembles are pleasing, instructive and full of laughter. Even the index of first lines is surreally madcap. Take the sad little story told in the first five:
A lesbian girl of Khartoum A maiden there lived in a large market-town A scandal or two A tail behind, a trunk in front A tangled web indeed we weave
—Paul Gray