Perhaps the reason that the name of Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) has faded is that he was a newspaper personality of a kind we just don’t have much anymore: a wit, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, and a figure on the comic-intellectual radio talk-show circuit. Or perhaps the reason that Adams is mostly forgotten is that he was a newspaperman, period. The fame-making power of having a daily column in a New York periodical just ain’t what it used to be.

A loss we suffer in his fading, however, is an awareness that he was a talented formalist poet who understood the difficult art of comic witing in verse. Rarely falling into slapstick or vulgarity, he had a genius for quick and clever verse. His most famous such venture is probably a New York Giants’ fan’s baseball threnody about the Chicago Cubs infield, “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” But his translations and updatings of Horace’s odes deserve recognition (as do Kipling’s).

On Wednesdays we try to offer lighter verse here in The New York Sun, and today’s Poem of the Day is Adams’s complaint about fiction-writers’ unwillingness to use the verb “to say.” In six-line stanzas — four lines of ballad meter, alternating four- and three-foot lines, followed by a tetrameter couplet — he quotes the torrent of fanciful verbs by which writers avoid saying that somebody said.

Monotonous Variety
by Franklin P. Adams
(All of them from two stories in a single magazine.)

She “greeted” and he “volunteered”; 
    She “giggled”; he “asserted”; 
She “queried” and he “lightly veered”; 
    She “drawled” and he “averted”; 
She “scoffed,” she “laughed” and he “averred”;
He “mumbled,” “parried,” and “demurred.”

She “languidly responded”; he 
    “Incautiously assented”; 
Doretta “proffered lazily”; 
    Will “speedily invented”; 
She “parried,” “whispered,” “bade,” and “mused”; 
He “urged,” “acknowledged,” and “refused.”

She “softly added”; “she alleged”; 
    He “consciously invited”; 
She “then corrected”; William “hedged”; 
    She “prettily recited”; 
She “nodded,” “stormed,” and “acquiesced” ; 
He “promised,” “hastened,” and “confessed.”

Doretta “chided”; “cautioned” Will; 
    She “voiced” and he “defended”; 
She “vouchsafed”; he “continued still”; 
    She “sneered” and he “amended”; 
She “smiled,” she “twitted,” and she “dared” 
He “scorned,” “exclaimed,” “pronounced,” and “flared.”

He “waived,” “believed,” “explained,” and “tried”; 
    “Commented” she; he “muttered”; 
She “blushed,” she “dimpled,” and she “sighed”; 
    He “ventured” and he “stuttered”; 
She “spoke,” “suggested,” and “pursued”; 
He “pleaded,” “pouted,” “called,” and “viewed.”

    *    *    *
O synonymble writers, ye 
    Whose work is so high-pricey. 
Think ye not that variety 
    May haply be too spicy? 
Meseems that in an elder day 
They had a thing or two to say.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.