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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• '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.

• Various poems across the collections

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