The need to lighten up …

… “Cheering as the Summer Weather”: On the Primal Appeal of Light Verse - Los Angeles Review of Books.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… some readers and critics maintain that light verse isn’t real poetry. It’s kids’ stuff, doggerel, greeting-card fodder, unhappy echoes of Richard Armour, whose whimsical riffs appeared in Sunday newspaper supplements starting in the Great Depression. Definitions of light verse are notoriously slippery. Connoisseurs and detractors alike defer to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” As to the charge of frivolity, the poet Bruce Bennett notes that the best writers of light verse “not only verge on seriousness; at times they embrace it.”

Mention of the Ladies Home Journal reminds me of Elizabeth McFarland, whose was that magazine's poetry editor for more than a decade. Here is piece I wrote about her.