Complete Poems

Summary

Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward. The poems are mostly short, tightly rhymed lyrics in traditional forms such as quatrains, ballades and sonnets, and their method is to set up a romantic or sentimental expectation and then puncture it with a final twist. The great subjects are love and its disappointments, the predictable ingratitude of men, the posturing of lovers, the sameness of romantic promises, and the bitter knowledge of a woman who has heard it all before. Alongside these are poems of mortality and despair that often treat suicide with mordant flippancy: the famous 'Résumé' runs through the drawbacks of each method of killing oneself and concludes that one might as well live. Other well-known pieces include 'One Perfect Rose', which deflates a lover's romantic gift by wishing for a limousine instead; 'News Item', a two-line epigram about girls who wear glasses; 'Unfortunate Coincidence', on the unreliability of lovers' vows; 'Symptom Recital', a catalogue of melancholy complaints concluding that the speaker is about to fall in love again; and 'Comment', which recites the clichés of optimism and love and undercuts them with an absurd final line. Behind the jokes lies real melancholy: Parker's poems speak of sleeplessness, drinking, weariness and the sense of being trapped in repeated romantic and emotional patterns. Early uncollected pieces include satirical 'Hate Songs' and verses on office life, war and society. The reference edition, edited with notes, also includes poems first published only in magazines and gives readers a fuller sense of Parker's range, from comic squibs to elegiac lyrics on death and memory.

Plot or Argument

• Enough Rope (1926)

  Parker's first and most successful collection, containing 'Résumé', 'One Perfect Rose', 'News Item' and 'Unfortunate Coincidence'.

• Sunset Gun (1928)

  A second collection continuing her ironic love poems and epigrams, with darker meditations on time and death.

• Death and Taxes (1931)

  Her third collection, more elegiac and accomplished, with poems on mortality, memory and the limits of love.

• Uncollected and early verse

  Magazine verse from the 1910s and later, including satirical 'Hate Songs', occasional pieces and poems not included in her books.

Lessons

• Wit as armour

  Parker's jokes protect against pain while revealing it. The poems show how humour can carry grief that cannot be spoken directly.

  • Does the humour in 'Résumé' make suicide seem less serious or more?
  • When does wit become evasion?

• Deflating romantic convention

  By using traditional forms to mock the clichés of love poetry, Parker exposes the gap between romantic language and women's experience.

  • How does 'One Perfect Rose' turn a love poem into a social comment?
  • What does Parker's speaker want from love?
  • How do these poems speak to modern dating culture?

• Light verse can be serious

  Parker's tight forms and surprise endings are technically demanding. Her work challenges the line between 'light' and 'serious' poetry.

  • Why have critics sometimes dismissed Parker's verse?
  • What makes a final line land?

Context

Parker's verse belongs to the New York of the Jazz Age and Prohibition, when magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker cultivated urbane wit. The Algonquin Round Table's lunches made Parker a celebrity, and her poems capture the 'new woman' who worked, drank and had affairs while remaining bound by older expectations.

Composition

Most poems first appeared in magazines and newspapers before collection. Enough Rope (1926) became a bestseller, unusual for poetry; Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931) followed, and the three were combined as Not So Deep as a Well (1936).

Reception

Hugely popular in her lifetime, Parker was later dismissed by some critics as a mere wit, but feminist and other readers have reassessed her craft and her account of women's emotional lives. Many of her lines have become proverbial.

Comparisons

• the-portable-dorothy-parker

  The Portable collection pairs selected poems with Parker's stories and reviews, which explore the same themes in prose.

• twenty-love-poems-and-a-song-of-despair

  Neruda's sensual, earnest love lyrics from the same decade are the opposite pole to Parker's ironic deflation of romantic feeling.

• the-metaphysical-poets

  Parker's witty turns and conceits about love and death descend in part from the tradition of Donne and Marvell.

• butterfield-8

  O'Hara's novel depicts the same speakeasy New York of drinking and disillusioned love.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The last line of each poem. Parker usually builds a familiar romantic or sentimental expectation through the opening lines and then overturns it at the end, as in One Perfect Rose, where the lover's single flower is answered by a wish for something far more expensive.
• Résumé in Enough Rope, which lists the drawbacks of one method of self-destruction after another in brisk rhymed lines and arrives at the decision to go on living. Notice how the comic surface carries a very dark subject.
• The way Unfortunate Coincidence and Comment treat lovers' promises and the clichés of optimism as phrases that have been said too many times to be believed.
• The shift in tone from Enough Rope to Death and Taxes, where the jokes grow quieter and the poems on mortality, memory, and weariness become more elegiac.
• The early uncollected Hate Songs and office verses, which aim the same wit at social types rather than at love.

Key terms and names

Light verse

Short, rhymed, witty poetry written to amuse, often first printed in magazines. Parker used its tight forms to carry serious subjects such as heartbreak, despair, and death.

Enough Rope

Parker's first collection (1926), which became a bestseller, rare for a book of poems. Its title plays on the saying about giving someone enough rope to hang himself, joining humour and darkness from the start.

Quatrain

A four-line stanza, usually rhymed, and Parker's favourite unit. Its compact shape lets her set up an expectation in three lines and spring the reversal in the fourth.

Epigram

A very short poem ending in a sharp, quotable point. News Item, only two lines long, is Parker's best-known example.

Algonquin Round Table

The circle of New York writers, critics, and editors who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. Parker's reputation for quick, cutting wit was formed there, and many of her poems first appeared in magazines connected to the group.

Not So Deep as a Well

The 1936 volume that gathered Parker's three collections. Its title comes from Mercutio's description of his fatal wound in Romeo and Juliet, another case of a wit joking while dying.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In One Perfect Rose, what does the lover send, what does the speaker say about it in the first stanzas, and how does the final stanza change her response?
2. Comprehension How does Résumé move through its list, and what conclusion does the speaker reach in the last line?
3. Comprehension Which subjects return most often across Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes, and which poems would you choose as examples of each?
4. Interpretation Parker's speakers often claim to have heard every promise of love before. Is their cynicism a sign of strength or of injury? Support your answer with Unfortunate Coincidence or Symptom Recital.
5. Interpretation In Résumé, does the joking tone make the subject of despair lighter, or does it make the despair more visible? What would be lost if the poem were written in a solemn voice?
6. Interpretation Why does Parker so often choose strict, old-fashioned forms such as quatrains, sonnets, and ballades for poems about modern disillusion?
7. Big Question Can laughter be a way of telling the truth about sorrow, or does it always keep sorrow at a safe distance?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 1 (Scripture)

  The Preacher finds that all things are full of weariness and there is nothing new under the sun. Parker's speakers, who find every lover's vow and every hopeful saying worn out by repetition, share his vantage, though the Preacher ends by turning to the fear of God while Parker's poems usually end with a shrug.

• Job 3 (Scripture)

  Job curses the day of his birth and longs for the rest of the grave, yet he does not take his own life and keeps speaking. Résumé likewise voices the wish to be done with living and still ends on the side of life, which makes a fruitful comparison of two very different kinds of honesty about despair.

• Augustine, Confessions IV (Church Fathers)

  Augustine describes the grief that overwhelmed him at the death of a friend and diagnoses it as the result of loving a mortal creature as though it would never die. Parker's poems of disappointed love describe the same wound from the inside, without Augustine's turn toward a love that cannot be lost.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Romantic love promises permanence and devotion; experience shows that its promises are repeated by every lover and kept by few; therefore the clear-sighted speaker refuses to be taken in and answers sentiment with irony. Yet the poems keep returning to love and to the wish for something lasting, which suggests that the irony protects a longing it cannot cure.

Rhetorical device: bathos. One Perfect Rose spends two stanzas on the traditional language of a lover's tender gift and then drops, in its final lines, to a practical complaint about why no one ever sends a costlier present. The sudden fall from the elevated to the ordinary is the joke and the point.

Debate: Resolved: Parker's wit is a defense against despair rather than a surrender to it.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose three poems from Enough Rope and Death and Taxes and analyse how Parker uses the final line to overturn the expectations set up earlier in each poem. Argue whether the reversal serves mainly to amuse or mainly to reveal something painful.

Comparison with The Metaphysical Poets: Donne and his fellow metaphysical poets also write witty, surprising poems about love and death. Compare one of Parker's love poems with a love poem by Donne or Marvell, and argue what each poet's wit is for: persuading a beloved, exposing a lover, or facing mortality.

Medical Lens

Suicide and despair are a recurring strand, treated with a flippancy that has made poems such as 'Résumé' widely quoted, including in discussions of how humour coexists with suicidal ideation. Parker made several suicide attempts in the 1920s and struggled with alcohol and depression for much of her life; biographical readings are common but should be offered cautiously. 'Symptom Recital' lists sleeplessness, irritability and listlessness in a mock-clinical voice before revealing the 'illness' as love, a useful text on the overlap of melancholic and romantic symptoms. Drinking runs through the verse as social ritual and consolation.

• 'Résumé' (Enough Rope)

  A catalogue of methods of suicide and their disadvantages, ending in reluctant survival.

  SuicideMelancholia Depression
• 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)

  A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.

  Melancholia DepressionSleep InsomniaHypochondria
• Various poems across the collections

  Drinking, hangovers and night-time wakefulness as part of the speaker's romantic misery.

  AlcoholSleep Insomnia

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a Parker-style quatrain that sets up a sentimental expectation and punctures it in the last line.

• Essay

  Read 'Symptom Recital' as a mock case history. What does it suggest about how lovesickness and melancholy were confused?

Further Reading

• Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, Marion Meade

• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker