My writing is bad,
And my speaking is worse;
They were all that I had,
My writing is bad;
It is frightfully sad,
And I don't care a curse.
My writing is bad,
And my speaking is worse.

There are visitors to the Zoo who gaze at the hippopotamus or the elephant and think these great creatures would be more nearly perfect if they were different. But the hippo and the elephant are facts . " Without his paradoxes, without his jokes, without his rhetorical switchbacks, Chesterton might perhaps be a cleverer philosopher. But he would not be Chesterton. It has often been supposed that he is not serious, because he is funny; actually he is funny because he is serious. Confident in his truth, he can afford to joke.... During an age of morbid rationalism, Chesterton reminded men that reason is indeed a wonderful tool, but a tool that needs material to work on and produces nothing if it does not take the existing world as its object.... To Chesterton as to Browning, the universe stands constant, solid—wondrous, under all the theories built up by intelligence, each as different from the others as were the reports of the blind men on the elephant. In that universe, with Chesterton's help we can grow deep spreading roots, and the shifting winds of the mind cannot drag us out of the soil for those brief and glorious flights that can only end in a quick fall. [3]

He is not a great poet, but he was incapable of turning a mean rhyme, and he was too fond of language ever to admit the bathetic or pedestrian. If his poems are unsubtle, that is in keeping with the "public" quality of all his writing—a concern with broad strokes and bold colour, a love of the oratorical. Poems like "The Rolling English Road" and "The Donkey" remain superb recitation pieces, and Chesterton would be pleased to know that public bar audiences are better prepared to hear them than are Hampstead drawing-rooms. He had an easy mastery of traditional verse forms including difficult ones like the ballade, and he learned much from such practitioners as Villon how to make his rhymes and images bite. Chesterton never had a moonlight or twilit phase in his poetic development: there was always boldness, wit, even anger. And he could write light verse which remains funny without being facetious. [4]

Consciously or unconsciously, every poet takes one or more of his predecessors as models. Usually, his instinct leads him to make the right choice, but not always. In Chesterton's case, for example, I think that Swinburne was a disastrous influence.... It is due to Swinburne that, all too often in his verses, alliteration becomes an obsessive tic.

Both in his prose and his verse, [Chesterton] sees, as few writers have, the world about him as full of sacramental signs or symbols. I would not call him a mystic like Blake, who could say: "Some see a heavenly host singing Holy, Holy, Holy." Chesterton never disregards the actual visible appearance of things. Then, unlike Wordsworth, his imagination is stirred to wonder, not only by natural objects, but by human artifacts as well. Probably most young children possess this imaginative gift, but most of us lose it when we grow up as a consequence, Chesterton would say, of the Fall.

In verses such as ["The Song of Quoodle"], there is little, if any, trace of Swinburnian influence. Behind them one detects the whole tradition of English comic verse, of Samuel Butler, Prior, Praed, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and, above all, W S. Gilbert. It was from such writers, I believe, that Chesterton, both in his verse and his prose, learned the art of making terse aphoristic statements which, once read or heard, remain unforgettably in one's mind. I cannot think of a single comic poem by Chesterton that is not a triumphant success. Greybeards at Play—until it was sent to me by John Sullivan, Chesterton's bibliographer, I had never heard of its existence: I have no hesitation in saying that it contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good. By natural gift, Chesterton was, I think, essentially a comic poet." [7]

his verse full of preachings, politics and arresting hymns of hate.... Chesterton, in spite of his frequent blare and bombast, has been extraordinarily successful in infusing true poetry into his thundering orchestra. God speaking through him, he knows no restraint, but comes at you, marches up the street and round the corner, a rage of music and colour that seeks to hold up the traffic. . . . But poetry that is merely like that does not necessarily contain the enduring line, the wonderful stanza, and it is astonishing that in the verse of Chesterton there is so much that is really fine. . . . There is plenty of magic in Chesterton's verse, not exactly the delicate elfish magic of Yeats or Walter de la Mare, a rather flick-in-the-eye magic if you like, but none the less evident. Sometimes, indeed, he achieves it when flying right into the jaws of bombast he steers miraculously clear, or when formulating a paradox he gets beyond the truth of paradox to the creation of the rose that shines upon the lips of truth. Then there is the Chesterton who is memorable because he says something very droll, even though it be penetratingly satirical. ... But Chesterton was a sort of God's fool, the Almighty's chosen jester, who fearlessly took liberties, secure in most instances beneath his cap and bells. [8]