Today’s Poem: archy confesses

A cockroach announces his place among the greats

George Herriman’s drawing for Don Marquis’s archy & mehitabel, 1927

Last year, when Sally Thomas and I were working on a column for the New York Sun, I had occasion to write about one of the newspaper’s old columnists, Don Marquis (1878–1937). Author of the “Sun Dial” column, before moving to the Tribune, Marquis invented several characters to use in his columns — most famously, Archy and Mehitabel, which he came up with in 1916.

It was as peculiar and wonderful a conceit as an American newspaper writer has ever attempted, since Archy is a poetry-writing cockroach, while his friend Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. On Wednesdays here in Poems Ancient and Modern, we try to feature light or comic verse, and for today I decided to revisit the New York Sun’s great columnist, rivaled only by Franklin P. Adams as a newspaper poet in the first half of the twentieth century, transcending what we have called the amateur poets.