From St. Nicholas magazine, December 1917.

Reblog if the Roman numeral at the top of the poem doubles as the answer to the rhetorical question.  From the Elson Primary School Reader, Book One, 1913.

This is what we think when critics attempt to mar our workmanship.  "Could it be dissemination of some wicked defamation of our blameless reputation by some imp of hell's creation?"  From the Ole Miss yearbook of 1898.

Reblog if "oh heck" is your boyfriend.  From Queens College's 1955 yearbook.

"And when they coffined him, / They laid the lizard on his heart."  From Pearson's, 1902.

"And yet I lift my sightless face / Toward the eerie light, / And tread the lonely way we trace / Across the haunted night."  From The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell, 1905.

"If here at the end of ages this is all—a white face floating in the whirling ball."  From "A Leaf from the Devil's Jest-Book" by Edwin Markham, in The Man with the Hoe, 1899.

Insomnia turns us into ghosts.  From Poems by B. D., 1880.

Typographical violets displace rivulets, and there's shining for shimmering.  A correction from Improvement Era, 1906.

From the dark depths of the human soul.  From Jugend, 1896.

Our Favorite Asterisk of All Time?

Check out the very special asterisk in this little verse from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle, 1887.  It stands for the word gloom (in all fairness, how much clarity can we expect of gloominess?) even as it concentrates what little light there is into a gleam in a house cat's eye.  Is the asterisk here a genuine example of visual poetry, or did the typesetter run out of space and improvise grandly?  We don't care, as the result stands.  (Note that we hunted down what would appear to be the web's only other gloomy asterisk, if only to give the cat's other eye a twinkle.)

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

U is for the Unicorn,
Who lived in mythic fantasies of old.
            This beast was born
            With just a single horn,
A total count of one, all told.
Alas, the Unicorn’s no more:
To moderns, who learn science in the crib,
            The myths of yore
            Are nothing but a bore;
The Unicorn is just a fib.