sock poet

[Jonathan Lighter]

All I can add is Professor Van Wienen's comment about his 1980s "conversion
experience" when he recognized that "[t]he politics of literature" is "the
most necessary and essential literary topic."

The "natural and inevitable opening, then exploding [get it?- ed.] of the
canon" allows the recognition of poets previously rejected by the enforcers
of hierarchies founded on elite tastes, poets like Wallace Irwin, for
example, in his "A Few Words from Wilhelm" (1905), p.43 :

Hi-lee, hi-lo, der vinds dey plow,
Choost like der Wacht am Rhein;
Und vat iss mein pelongs to Me
Und vat iss yours iss mein!

I love the interlingual wordplay and the subtle political humor in this
eerie adumbration (ten years before the Lusitania!)  of rabid wartime
anti-Germanism. Further, the metaphysicality of the simile in ll. 1 - 2 is
breathtaking. Could Whitman or Dickinson or Frost have pulled off so _tour_
a _de force_?  I think not!

Well, I guess I've extorted enough fun from this topic....

JL



On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: sock poet
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 4:14 PM -0400 10/24/10, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >I've looked into this and, as I half suspected, the blurb about the
> >mysterious "sock poets" is essentially an academic press's advertising
> >gimmick to influence you to buy the book. I mean, who could they be?
> >
> >Those whom the blurb memorably designates  the "sock poets" were a
> momentary
> >school of versifiers who responded to a weekly contest in the N.Y. _Sun_
> to
> >write the best darn poems they could about knitting socks for doughboys
> >overseas. Prizes were various amounts of wool yarn.
> >
> >The best of the best were anthologized at the end of the war in a little
> >anthology called _Sock Songs_, which you can read at Google Books.
> >
> >Look! Here's a distinguished sock poet now! It's Edgar Alcott!:
> >
> >A SOLDIER BOY
> >
> >There's a soldier boy far across the deep sea
> >Who is fighting for you, fighting for me.
> >I do not know his name, still no stranger is he,
> >For he's fighting to make all humanity free.
> >
> >I'm knitting socks for this dear soldier boy,
> >It gives me great pleasure, satisfaction and joy.
> >He's some loving mother's son, we all know,
> >Still he's fighting for you and for me also.
> >Ever read anything quite like it?  I bet you haven't!  We should be
> thankful
> >to Professor Van Wienen and the University of Illinois Press for bringing
> to
> >light this forgotten moment of American literary history, for coining the
> >name "sock poet" (my retroactive nomination for WOTY 2002)
>
> You do realize that this would require us to unpick "weapons of mass
> destruction".  Of course, it might be only fair to do some unpicking
> here, especially if Mr. Alcott's knitter was working with wool.  (As
> noted earlier, this particular "unpick" is still alive and well, at
> least in the U.K.  In _An Unsuitable Job for a Woman_, P. D. James
> has one of her characters comment about the fate of some jerseys left
> by a dead man,
> "Take them away and give them to anyone who needs them. Unless you
> think I ought to unpick the wool and knit it up into something new?
> Would that be a suitable gesture, do you think, symbolic of wasted
> effort, pathos, futility?"
>
> Maybe Mr. Alcott's poem could be unpicked and the words used for
> another purpose.
>
> LH
>
>
>
> >, and especially
> >for not including Mr. Alcott's poem in their anthology, which, so far as I
> >can tell, features only one sock poem, by Helen Topping Miller. It is
> almost
> >noticeably more profound than the above. And more tightly knit.
> >
> >JL
> >
>
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