I USED to wonder sometimes if they thought me as clever as I really was,
When I criticised all the others
In those far-away nights when we met at the National Arts Club.
I think Corinne Roosevelt Robinson knew I was clever
Because I never liked any of her unpublished poems —
I tried to be lucid about it, but sometimes when I was speaking,
I saw by the smile on the faces of some of the other writers
That they thought I had come to a line of theirs that I really admired.
Lucidity is a lost art,
And Poets are very provincial, unless they can combine humor and pathos as I can —
It is hard to be funny after one is dead, however.
It is lonely being funny after one is dead —
I think I would rather be at the Poetry Society than dead, —
At least there , the joke is on the other fellow! —