Birthday: Guest, who?

Today is the birthday of Edgar A. Guest (1881-1959). Born in England, he became a naturalized American citizen and started working for the Detroit Free Press in 1898.

Over the next sixty years, Guest composed over eleven thousand poems in the relentlessly upbeat style of the 20C Midwest. He published 33 collections, had two radio shows, and, in 1951, even a TV show on NBC.

Guest was the first poet laureate of Michigan from 1952 to 1959, and the experience was such that no one has ever been named the second laureate.

His natural constituency was the subscriber to Reader's Digest who listened to all of Paul Harvey's daily radio broadcasts.

After losing the presidency to General Dwight Eisenhower for a second time in 1956, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson regaled reporters at his morning-after press conference with a revision of a Guest staple:

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
     But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
     Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
     On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
     That couldn’t be done,
AND HE COUNDN'T DO IT.

Guest's version, of course, ended, " and he did it."

The poet is best remembered today via New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker's withering couplet. Invoking an advance in the diagnosis of syphilis, Parker wrote in the 1920s,

"I'd rather fail my Wassermann test
Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest."