‘It All Started’ 10,000 Works Ago for Versatile Poet Richard Armour

Like Robert Frost, satirist Richard Armour dismisses free verse, likening it to playing tennis without a net.

By any standard, including that set by Frost, Armour ranks as a remarkable talent. Since 1935, the Claremont author and educator has published more than 10,000 pieces of the sort of poetry most beholden to the mechanical considerations valued by Frost: light verse. More incredibly, this prolific output wasn’t even the path by which he achieved his greatest fame.

Inspired principally by Jonathan Swift, Armour developed his approach to prose with his “It All Started With” books in the 1950s. Lampooning personages and events of historical fact and fancy in a style dense with puns and anachronisms, the spoofs established him as a premiere satirist.

Whether poking fun at America’s past (“It All Started With Columbus”), warfare (“Stones and Clubs”), medicine (“Hippocrates”) or even Communism (“Marx”), each book was intended to entertain even those not familiar with what was being parodied.

Armour’s academic career, during which he lectured at 200 campuses worldwide, was spent mostly as a professor of English, literature and poetry, chiefly at Scripps College in Claremont. Now 82 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he lives in quiet semi-retirement with his wife, Kathleen.

“Going Around in Academic Circles,” “A Diabolical Dictionary of Education” and “It All Started With Freshman English” are but three of the titles that Armour devoted exclusively to the ribbing of his colleagues.

Punch Lines in Footnotes

To prove he didn’t take classroom discourses too seriously, works like “American Lit Relit” and “The Classics Reclassified” lampooned every literary great from Homer (“Almost nothing is known about Homer, which explains why so much has been written about him”) to Hemingway (“The reader will notice how Hemingway has gotten rid of the non-essentials and is moving toward that mastery of the writer’s art which would permit him also to get rid of the essentials”). And, in most of his books, many of his best punch lines were buried in footnotes, the scholar’s digression of choice.

With most of his books out of print and readily available only in libraries, Armour doubts that his place in the annals of American letters is secure. “I really don’t think my work is lasting,” he said.

Even so, interest remains in his work, though it’s hard to imagine how “It All Started With Eve”--his facetious history of womankind, typically dependent on wordplay--will translate for the edition being prepared in Hungarian.

Most of his 65 books feature at least some verse, although many of his stanzas were first published in “Armour’s Armory,” his widely syndicated newspaper column. The New Yorker began publishing Armour during the Great Depression.

Kathleen Armour, who looks and sounds younger than her years, met her future husband when both were first-graders in Pomona, although they were only acquaintances until they reached college.

Remaining Close to Roots

Eventually his career required extended stays for the couple in many distant locales, including Germany just as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Still, throughout much of their 55-year marriage, which produced a son and a daughter, they have managed to remain close to their roots. Their home now is in a retirement community in Claremont, only six miles from where they were raised.

Until the onset of his ailment a few years ago, Armour was a passionate, low-handicap golfer. His love for the sport prompted two of his books, including “Golf Is a Four-Letter Word.”

He thinks his disease is “somewhere in the middle” of the extremes exhibited in various victims. “I think every day about death,” Armour confides. His wife, meanwhile, laments about how the neurological disorder has made writing very difficult for him, and “he thinks his life has no meaning if he can’t write.”

Thus Armour spends much of his time revising old pieces of his verse. He toils in his bedroom office, diligently isolating phrases that could benefit from a rewrite.

While Armour clearly recalls the time he appeared with Groucho Marx on “You Bet Your Life,” he prefers to reminisce about his frequent television appearances as Johnny Carson’s guest.

Armour remains one of the world’s foremost authorities on Bryan Waller Procter, the 19th-Century British poet, playwright and essayist better known as Barry Cornwall.

The subject of Armour’s dissertation at Harvard as well as of a subsequent, serious tome, Cornwall died in 1874 at the age of 86. “Cornwall lived a very long life in a time of short-lived people. He was important only because he knew so many important persons,” Armour explains, referring to figures such as Byron, Shelley and Keats. Armour has known some important people. He said Carl Sandburg once coached him on how his daily calisthenics could be done more efficiently. He remembers Frost both for his extreme political partisanship and as a raconteur: “He was a great talker who just went on and on and on, talking about everything until 3 o’clock in the morning.”

An Admirer of Chaucer

Addressing the question of who in literary history he would have most wanted to meet, Armour’s response was instant: “Chaucer,” after whom his son, Geoffrey, is named.

One of Armour’s most enriching reads was “Our Presidents.” Published in 1983, it was a set of 40 biographical poems, one for each chief executive (Grover Cleveland was allotted two). The collection represented a union of the two genres that Armour mastered, historical satire and light verse. In the book’s acknowledgement, he made a small apology: “I alone am to be blamed for a sometimes irreverent attitude and for an occasional use of poetic license in dealing with the facts and legends of history.”

Blamed? His readers no doubt thanked him, especially those who could use some help in distinguishing President Tyler from President Taylor:

Yes, Tyler signed with steady pen

His vetoes fell like snow.

And was he reelected then,

or nominated? No.

After 16 months, a short while indeed

His term hadn’t yet expired, but he’d.