Welcome to you and to Edgar A. Guest

It's time to learn how this thing works.

Edgar and I actually means that I welcome Edgar A. Guest and his poetry to the blog. He is my Welcome Guest, who I want to share with you.

His name was familiar from my high school English and Literature class. Frankly, I couldn't tell you much about him (or any of the other authors, for that matter).

A year ago I was fortunate and privileged to come across a book of his works in, of all places, the Northwestern Wisconsin cabin of his great niece. I was there as a new member of 'The Cool Guys' (another topic later).

His story and his poems both were facinating. He wrote what were usually short, 3 to 4 stanza poems about life and his homespun philosophoy of the early 1900's. After reading a few of the poems I thought, here is Will Roger's thoughts put down to a Dr. Seuss rhyme and rhythm. Then I found out that he was born in 1881, Will Rogers in 1879 and Dr. Seuss in 1904. They were contemporaries. It well could be that Will Rogers was influenced by an Edgar A. Guest philosophy and that Dr. Seuss by an Edgar A. Guest poetic beat.

His poems were of a single topic and ended in a way that would bring you to laugh, cry, smile or shake your head. By the time you got to the last stanza, you could feel the last line coming on. It was like making love. You knew that the poem had been building in you and you were about to experience the last - the bottom - line. If you know what I am talking about, I don't have to tell you; if you don't know what I'm talking about, I still don't have to tell you.

So over time I will offer you my best of guest poems as well as more of the intreguing story of this man who for 4 years wrote one poem a day for a Michigan Newspaper.

We'll start with one of his poems called, "What We Need", quoting the thoughts of an old timer.


What We Need – (1921)

We were settin’ there an’ smokin’ of our pipes, discussin’ things,
Like licker, votes for wimmin, an’ the totterin’ thrones o’ kings,
When he ups an’ strokes his whiskers with his hand an’ says t’ me:
“Changin’ laws an’ legislatures ain’t as fur as I can see,
Goin’ to make this world much better, unless somehow we can
Find a way to make a better an’ a finer sort o’ man.

“The trouble ain’t with statutes or with systems – not at all:
It’s with humans jest like we air an’ their petty ways an’ small.
We could stop our writin’ law-books an’ our regulatin’ rules
If a better sort of manhood was the product of our schools.
For the things that we air needin’ ain’t no writin’ from a pen
Or bigger guns to shoot with, but a bigger type of men.

“I reckon all these problems air jest ornery like the weeds.
They grow in soil that oughta nourish only decent deeds,
An’ they waste out time an’ fret us when, if we were thinking straight
An’ livin’ right, they wouldn’t be so terrible an’ great.
A good horse needs no snaffle, an’ a good man, I opine,
Doesn’t need a law to check him or to force him into line.

”If we ever start in teachin’ to our children, year by year,
How to live with one another, there’ll be less o’ trouble here.
If we’d teach em how to neighbor an’ to walk in honor’s ways,
We could settle every problem which the mind o’ man can raise.
What we’re needin’ isn’t systems or some regulatin’ plan,
But a bigger an’ a finer an’ a truer type o’ man.