Poems of Fun and Fancy

by David Stanford Burr

Includes light verse, nonesense rhymes, poetic puns and witty word play. Features verfse by William Shakespeare, E.E. Cummings, Mother Goose and more.

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Tandava Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems here seemed very skewed to the 19th century. Quite a lot of Edward Lear, for example, and Lewis Carroll. Very little that was more recent (one by Shel Silverstein, for instance). I get the feeling they didn't want to shell out for anything that was still in copyright. There were a few older poems, too, though that humor often ages less well (and at least one required significant knowledge of Latin). I wouldn't have included so many Mother Goose Rhymes -- Jack and Jill, for instance, is a single stanza, everyone knows it, and it's not particularly fun or fanciful. But there were quite a number of poems that I enjoyed, and a few that I may want to memorize. I liked how there were occasional pairs of an original poem or nursery rhyme and one written in response to it. Oh, and it also has the full original version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which I never knew existed, so points for that.