The Glass-Half-Full Poet: Edgar Guest and the American Spirit

Edgar Guest on his radio program in 1935. (Public Domain)

Like millions of other immigrants to America, Edgar Albert Guest (1881–1959) worked hard, overcame adversity, made good, and loved the land that gave birth to his dreams and ambitions.

He was born in Birmingham, England. In 1891, his mother and father moved the family to Detroit, Michigan. There, at age 11, Guest began working odd jobs to help out at home when his father was temporarily unemployed. In his early teens, he found work as a copy boy at the Detroit Free Press.

When Guest was 17, his father died, and he left high school to support his family, working his way up at the paper from police reporter to columnist when in his mid-20s. By the time he was 30, nearly all his writing for the paper appeared as poems in a column titled “Breakfast Table Chat.” These daily verses soon became wildly popular and were at one time syndicated in over 300 newspapers. Published in 1916, his poetry collection “A Heap o’ Livin’” eventually sold a million copies, a phenomenal record for any book but particularly so for poetry.

Guest wrote for the Detroit paper for over 60 years, during which time he published over 11,000 poems. More than 20 volumes of his poetry were sold to the public, and his 945-page “Collected Verse,” published in 1934, found such an enthusiastic audience that it ran into 11 editions.

Widely known at the time as “the poet of the people,” he hosted a popular radio show from 1931 until 1942. And in 1951, NBC television featured him in “A Guest in Your House.”

The high school dropout had made his mark.

Of Time and the Critics

Though Edgar Guest still has fans, far fewer today remember the man who was once a household name in towns and cities across America.

This gradual erasure from the collective memory is in part the result of the changing tides of time and taste. The old is washed away, and the new rushes to shore. Most of the bestselling novelists of the first half of the 20th century, for example, are forgotten. Artists and musicians then celebrated as geniuses lie unremarked in their graves. Such is the nature of time and changes in fashion.

Edgar Guest wrote for the Detroit paper for over 60 years, during which time he published over 11,000 poems. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

In the case of Guest, some contemporary critics and poets, a few of them undoubtedly jealous of his fame and success, rolled their eyes at his verse and derided it as being too simplistic, too optimistic, and far too sentimental. That evaluation remains his reputation today. In almost any encounter with Guest and his standing as a poet, such as occurs in the Encyclopedia Britannica, these adjectives with their whiff of condescension are still used to describe him.

And they’re on target. Edgar Guest’s verse was as they say: simple, optimistic, and sentimental.

Yet I would contend that these same qualities explain precisely why millions read his poetry.

Simplicity

Guest never claimed the genius of a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson. As he once said of his verse, “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 the final eight lines of “My Creed,” he gives us this summation of his code:

To leave some simple mark behind To keep my having lived in mind; If enmity to aught I show, To be an honest, generous foe, To play my little part, nor whine That greater honors are not mine. This, I believe, is all I need For my philosophy and creed.

“Some simple mark” and “to play my little part” seem his frank evaluation of his own status as a poet and a man.

Optimism

Despite the Great Depression and two horrific world wars, one quality associated with the American character during that era was a confident belief in individual effort and resilience, all buoyed up by a jaunty attitude toward life. We see this outlook reflected in many of the films of the 1930s, for instance, or in books like Dale Carnegie’s 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” works that only Americans of that time could have produced.

Guest reflects and promotes these same virtues in his verse. “It Couldn’t Be Done,” which is one of his better-known meditations in meter and rhyme and was even featured in an Audi commercial some years ago, gives us this can-do American spirit:

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands to prophesy failure, There are thousands to point out to you one by one, The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing That “cannot be done,” and you'll do it.

Sentimentality

In the movie “Local Color,” a critic and a painter are discussing the place of sentiment in art when the critic remarks, “Sentiment is a sloppy, sugary, emotional form of gushing which is indicative of the lack of intellect.” And the painter replies, “You have so much intellect that you have become stupid, Curtis.”

Published in 1916, Edgar Guest's poetry collection “A Heap o’ Livin’” eventually sold a million copies. (generic)

Can Guest’s poetry be called sentimental? Absolutely, if by that word we mean Oxford Languages’ definition: “of or prompted by feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia.” The more limited literary meaning of sentiment adds to this definition “typically in an exaggerated or self-indulgent way.”

Those who attach sentiment to Edgar Guest’s reputation seems to favor the literary meaning of the word, which reveals that they’ve understood neither Guest nor his audience. He published his poems in a newspaper, meant to be read by men, women, and children as they sat at the breakfast table or in the den after supper, hardworking people who knew life’s joys and sorrows, its comedies and tragedies. The topics Guest addressed so frequently—family, friendship, birth, death, love of God and country—were not for them abstract concepts, but were the living realities of daily living.

Guest’s “A Child of Mine” is an exchange between God and two parents entrusted with the care and keeping of their child. To them God explains:

He‘ll bring his charms to gladden you, And should his stay be brief. You’ll have his lovely memories, As solace for your grief. I cannot promise he will stay, Since all from earth return.

At the poem’s end, the parents reply:

We‘ll shelter him with tenderness, We’ll love him while we may, And for the happiness we’ve known, Forever grateful stay. But should the angels call for him, Much sooner than we’ve planned, We'll brave the bitter grief that comes, And try to understand.

Is this “a sloppy, sugary, emotional piece of gushing”? If we search out this poem on FamilyFriendlyPoems.com and scroll down, we can read the testimonies of moms and dads whose children have died and who have found comfort in Guest’s words. Only people with a heart of stone could read these testimonials for their deceased daughters or sons and dismiss them as sloppy and sugary. Moreover, Guest knew whereof he spoke, having lost his own little girl, age 13 months.

End Notes

Critics of Guest’s poetry often forget a singular, important fact. He was a newspaper man who was proud of his life’s work. In a 1939 interview, he said: “I’ve never been late with my copy and I’ve never missed an edition. And that’s seven days a week.” Every day for three decades, the Detroit Free Press featured a poem by Guest in its pages.

Give that assignment to most poets, then or now, and they would be pulling out their hair and snapping their pencils in half before the week was ended.

Much more important to general readers, as we read some of Guest’s poems, is whether today’s culture isn’t in need of the spirit we find in his verses. We may smile and turn away from his verse, dismissing it as trite or idealistic, and not pertinent to our own tribulations and bitter divisions, yet that would be a mistake.

Let me make this point with a piece from Guest’s “Poems of Patriotism.” This old, thin volume from 1922, which I borrowed from our local college library, was originally published a few years earlier during World War I. Here we find “The Time for Deeds,” which ends this way:

If in honor and glory our flag is to wave, If we are to keep this—the land of the brave; If more than fine words are to fashion our creeds, Now must our hands and our hearts turn to deeds. We are challenged by tyrants our strength to reveal! Oh, God! let us prove that our courage is real!

This exhortation may be a century old, but it arrives as fresh as this morning’s headlines. Here is a call to liberty that should speak to Americans in any age.