Franklin P. Adams, a newspaper personality of a kind we just don’t have much anymore, chronicles the torrent of fanciful verbs by which writers avoid saying that somebody said.
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Perhaps the reason that the name of Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) has faded is that he was a newspaper personality of a kind we just don’t have much anymore: a wit, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, and a figure on the comic-intellectual radio talk-show circuit. Or perhaps the reason that Adams is mostly forgotten is that he was a newspaperman, period. The fame-making power of having a daily column in a New York periodical just ain’t what it used to be.
A loss we suffer in his fading, however, is an awareness that he was a talented formalist poet who understood the difficult art of comic witing in verse. Rarely falling into slapstick or vulgarity, he had a genius for quick and clever verse. His most famous such venture is probably a New York Giants’ fan’s baseball threnody about the Chicago Cubs infield, “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” But his translations and updatings of Horace’s odes deserve recognition (as do Kipling’s).
On Wednesdays we try to offer lighter verse here in The New York Sun, and today’s Poem of the Day is Adams’s complaint about fiction-writers’ unwillingness to use the verb “to say.” In six-line stanzas — four lines of ballad meter, alternating four- and three-foot lines, followed by a tetrameter couplet — he quotes the torrent of fanciful verbs by which writers avoid saying that somebody said.
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