No one can set aside Franklin P. Adams, author of ‘The Conning Tower,’ as a master of the genre of newspaper poetry.
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Over the past two years here in The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, we’ve run several poems by newspaper columnists — recollecting the days in which newspapers would fairly often break into verse. It was a time, lasting well into the 20th century, in which every literate person was expected to be able to produce, if not great poetry, then at least poems that were correct in meter and rhyme, when the occasion demanded.
The greatest of those newspaper poets remains, we chauvinistically think, the Sun’s own Don Marquis (1878–1937), but no one can set aside Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) as a master of the genre. As we explained when we featured “Monotonous Variety,” his complaint about fiction writers’ word choice, and “A Ballad of Baseball Burdens,” Adams was a Manhattan newspaper columnist back when that was very much a gig that mattered.
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