If
we had advertised for a poet to exemplify our mission of
nurturing potential, we could have asked for no better
applicant than Edgar Guest. Unhappily he has been dead for 45 years.
Happily we can reproduce his poem It Couldn't Be Done.
Edgar
Albert Guest was born in August 1881 in Birmingham, England
and died in August 1959 in Detroit, USA. His
family moved to the United States in 1891. Four
years later he went to work for the Detroit Free Press
as a police reporter. He then became a writer of
daily rhymes, which became so popular that they were
syndicated to newspapers throughout the United States.
His books include: A Heap O' Livin' and Just
Folks.
Guest
has been called "the poet of the people", but
considered himself, as he put it, "a newspaperman
who wrote verses". He said: "I take
simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it
happens to a lot of other people and I make simple
rhymes out of them".
In
addition to the main verse, we have added a further page
with two more of Guest's poems Sermons We See and
They Earned the Right. The former has a
nice touch of NLP modelling about it; the latter once
again resonates with potential.
As
we say below, we do not claim to be literary critics; we
know what we like, and we like Edgar Guest's style that
points morals in a totally unpresumptuous way. If,
like us, you enjoy what you read, you can find more of
his verse at
