unknown
authors of _The Merry-Thought_ had some notion, however discontinuous,
of parodying the nation's polite literature. Were not Pope and Swift
famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing
than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic
ideal--a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic
merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world--the spontaneous
productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation.
Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement
as a medium for--as well as a subject of--their inscriptions. _The
Merry-Thought_, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked
in _MacFlecknoe_ and Pope in his _Dunciad_--the work of bad poets
masquerading as geniuses.[1] Rather, it is a primitive form of folk art
produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and
achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a
respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.[2] Like modern
"serial" graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since
the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their
own contributions.

[Footnote 1: On the other hand, the willingness of publishers to
bring out such material would have suited well enough with Pope's
picture of heir heroic games. See Alexander Pope, _The Dunciad_, ed.
James utherland, Twickenham Edition, 2d ed., rev. (London: Methuen,
1953), 97-306, bk 2, lines 17-220.]

[Footnote 2: See, for example, W. H. Auden's "Academic Graffiti," in
Collected Poems_, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (London: Faber and Faber,
976), 510-18. Such a verse as the following is more clever than most
raffiti, but like ordinary graffiti it remains essentially
"unpoetic": Lord Byron / Once succumbed to a Siren. / His flesh was
weak, / Hers reek."]

Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of graffiti is that in an
impermanent form it testifies to the continuance over the centuries of
certain human concerns. Recent studies of graffiti have often focused on
particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems,
and on specific political commentary.[3] But such local matters aside,
the content of modern graffiti is surprisingly like that of earlier
periods: scatological observations, laments of lovers, accusations
against women for their sexual promiscuity, the repetition of "trite"
poems and sayings