Famous Single Poems
The moral at the close may be found old-fashioned and banal, and the puns sometimes a little forced, but, as a whole, the poem has lost none of its sparkle.
Mr. Howells hazarded the opinion that “but for the professional devotion of the able lawyer, we might have counted in him the cleverest of our society poets.” But this may be doubted. He was a one-poem man, visited once and once only by genuine inspiration. His other poems show a certain whimsicality and facility in rhyme, but none of them approaches “Nothing to Wear.” They are written out of the air, not out of experience, and time has worn them as thin as ghosts.
William Allen Butler was not a born poet—he was a born lawyer; his career proves that. Indeed one has only to look at the photograph which he had taken in 1857 and includes in his book. Nothing could be more typically legalistic than the face and figure there portrayed. But both in his father’s family and in his wife’s family the feminine sex was in a large majority. He had five sisters and his wife had four sisters. Consequently whenever the families got together, the usual subject of discussion was clothes, and the phrase “nothing to wear,” in connection with proposed entertainments or social festivities, was continually in his ears. This was the inspiration. It was of this
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