The Press: Into God’s Slumber Grove

Princeton students once voted him the world’s worst poet, and a jeering couplet hounded him for years: “I’d rather flunk my Wassermann test/Than read a poem by Edgar Guest.”* Such insults missed their mark, for Edgar Albert Guest never even pretended to be a poet. Said he: “I am a newspaperman who writes verse.” And at the time he died last week at 77, Edgar Guest’s success as a verse-writing newspaperman had never before been equaled and may never be again.

Genial, gentle Eddie Guest was born in England, came to Detroit with his parents in the 1890s, dropped out of high school before graduation, and washed glasses in a drugstore. He landed an office boy’s job with the Detroit Free Press, worked his way onto the news staff and became a first-rate police reporter. But life’s seamy side was not for Edgar Guest; he asked for a change of assignment and was moved to the exchange desk—where a steady flow of incoming verse inspired him to try a hand himself. By 1916 he was rhyming his own column seven days a week, and he kept it up for 43 years.

By ordinary literary standards, Guest’s verse was mundane doggerel, written in soporific singsong and filled with synthetic back-country colloquialism. Guest’s world abounded with wimmen folks, doctor folks, farmer folks and jes’ plain folks. He extolled friendship and friends, God and worship, his wife Nellie, his son Bud, his daughter Janet, the virtues of porch sitting, of babies, tablecloths, wood-burning stoves and wooden tubs, sausage, and two kinds of pie (lemon and raisin). To Edgar Guest, death was “God’s great slumber grove” or “the golden afterwhile.” Samples of his rhyming:

Ain’t it good when life seems dreary

And your hopes about to end,

Just to feel the handclasp cheery

Of a fine old loyal friend?

Ain’t no use as I can see

In sittin’ underneath a tree

An’ growlin’ that your luck is bad,

An’ that your life is extry sad . . .

Such verses carried Eddie Guest to fame and wealth. With the Free Press as his home base, Guest at one time saw his verses syndicated in 275 newspapers. He filled 25 books, and some 3,000,000 people bought them, as before they had bought Ella Wheeler Wilcox and James Whitcomb Riley. A Heap o’ Livin’ (“It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home/A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have to roam”) alone went through 35 printings, sold more than 1,000,000 copies. At his peak, Guest earned $128,000 a year. He had many impressive friends; Henry Ford and William Lyon Phelps were among his greatest admirers. He owned two handsome homes—a vast, colonnaded winter residence in Detroit, a summer home in fashionable Pointe aux Barques.

Guest’s success confounded him almost as much as it did his critics. As well as anyone else he knew his limitations. “I do the same kind of jingles that James Whitcomb Riley used to write,” said Guest. “All he tried to be was sincere.” All Eddie Guest was was sincere; reading his verses on TV, he used to weep with the emotions they aroused in him. And perhaps it was because millions of readers recognized sincerity and shared in those emotions that Edgar A. Guest, the newspaperman who wrote verse, was a U.S. phenomenon.

*Often attributed to Poet-Humorist Dorothy Parker, who publicly denied authorship: “My God, no. I demand an apology for even thinking I would write such a dreadful rhythm.”