Light poetry

Light poetry or light verse is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Light poems are usually brief, can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play including puns, adventurous rhyme, and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition. While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope, and Auden, also excelled at light verse. Richard Armour Max Beerbohm Hilaire Belloc John Betjeman Morris Bishop Lord Byron C. S. Calverley Lewis Carroll Charles E. Carryl Brian P. Cleary William Rossa Cole Wendy Cope Noël Coward Alma Denny Henry Austin Dobson T. S. Eliot Willard R. Espy Gavin Ewart Charles Ghigna W. S. Gilbert Arthur Guiterman A. P. Herbert Oliver Herford Thomas Hood Frank Jacobs X. J. Kennedy Joyce La Mers Edward Lear Dennis Lee Newman Levy J. Patrick Lewis J. A. Lindon Don Marquis David McCord Phyllis McGinley David Morice Vladimir Nabokov Ogden Nash Dorothy Parker Alexander Pope Maurice Sagoff Shel Silverstein James Kenneth Stephen Jonathan Swift John Updike John Whitworth John Wilmot Wilhelm Busch Heinz Erhardt Robert Gernhardt Christian Morgenstern Joachim Ringelnatz Erich Kästner Eugen Roth Mascha Kaléko Drs.