The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum

by Wallace Irwin, Gelett Burgess (Introduction)

For when I pushed Brick Murphy to the rope Mame manned the ambulance and dragged him in, Massaged his lamps with fragrant drug store dope And coughed up loops of kindergarten chin; She sprang a come back, piped for the patrol, Then threw a glance that tommyhawked my soul.

Genres: Poetry

41 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Humorist brother of the more serious Will Irwin.

Reviews

[Jonathan Bogart · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early twentieth century, the noisiest and most creative U.S. humorists were in Chicago, although New York was (as ever) holding its own; but utopian end-of-the-line San Francisco was a dark horse. Anyway, this is a collection of twenty-odd sonnets in period (circa 1903) slang mirroring elements of Shakespeare's "dark lady" cycle. Technically quite accomplished, almost never actually vernacular, the primary joke being the contrast between Elizabethan rhetoric and pungent street-urchin idioms. The tongue-in-cheek introduction by Gelett Burgess claiming a new breakthrough in poetic technique isn't entirely kidding; but it's a tradition that I think of as ending with Walt Kelly.

[Alaina Sloo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way to describe these poems is to quote one:

"On the dead level I am sore of heart,
For nifty Mame has frosted me complete,
Since ten o'clock G.M., when on the street
I saw my lightning finish from the start.
O goo-goo eye, how glassy gazed thou art
To freeze my spinach solid when we meet,
..."

There is the occasional offensive reference (this poem, e.g., includes a reference to a Dago), and probably more things are offensive than I actually understood, but as cultural history, this volume of poems is humorous and interesting.