Word: whitcomb
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...Whitcomb did not comment further...
...WHITCOMB...
...American spirit -the rugged self-reliance of the frontier. Frost seemed a throwback to an earlier time when philosophical and social questions could be handily submitted to farmyard logic. Just because of this, many latter-day critics who set the fashions regarded him slightingly-as a kind of James Whitcomb Riley with muscles. Intellectuals today tend to look on the age of anxiety as an urban affair, a unique fix man has just now got himself into. Frost's genial parsing of the components of the world in terms of bears and blueberrying, they feel, just...
...verses carried Eddie Guest to fame and wealth. With the Free Press as his home base, Guest at one time saw his verses syndicated in 275 newspapers. He filled 25 books, and some 3,000,000 people bought them, as before they had bought Ella Wheeler Wilcox and James Whitcomb Riley. A Heap o' Livin' ("It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home/A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have to roam") alone went through 35 printings, sold more than 1,000,000 copies...
Guest's success confounded him almost as much as it did his critics. As well as anyone else he knew his limitations. "I do the same kind of jingles that James Whitcomb Riley used to write," said Guest. "All he tried to be was sincere." All Eddie Guest was was sincere; reading his verses on TV, he used to weep with the emotions they aroused in him. And perhaps it was because millions of readers recognized sincerity and shared in those emotions that Edgar A. Guest, the newspaperman who wrote verse, was a U.S. phenomenon...