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A selection of the best of the hilarious free-verse poems by the irreverent cockroach poet Archy and his alley-cat pal Mehitabel. Don Marquis's famous fictional insect appeared in his newspaper columns from 1916 into the 1930s, and he has delighted generations of readers ever since. A poet in a former life, Archy was reincarnated as a bug who expresses himself by diving headfirst onto a typewriter. His sidekick Mehitabel is a streetwise feline who claims to have been Cleopatra in a previous life. As E. B. White wrote in his now-classic introduction, the Archy poems "contain cosmic reverberations along with high comedy" and have "the jewel-like perfection of poetry." Adorned with George Herriman's whimsical illustrations and including White's introduction, our Pocket Poets selection--the only hardcover Archy and Mehitabel in print--is a beautiful volume, and perfectly sized for its tiny hero.… (more)
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"mehitabel was once cleopatra"
boss i am disappointed in
some of your readers they
are always asking how does
archy work the shift so as to get a
new line or do that they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not
[.....]
i have been talking it over in a
friendly way who were you
mehitabel i asked her i was
cleopatra once she said well i said i
suppose you lived in a palace you bet
she said and what lovely fish dinners
we used to have and licked her chops
[....]
archy is both erudite and amusing. Some issues he covers are still relevant today, as the ending of the poem "what the ants are saying":
rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the billion meticulations of the roots
it wont be long now it wont be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone
dear boss i relay this inofrmation
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
This edition is one in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series (I hope to eventually collect all of them). There are other archy and mehitabel editions out there that may have a different collection of poems by archy. Since this is the "Best of", I do not know how many of his poems have been excluded from this edition.