Release date is 2026-02-01

Al Haines

"Poems from Punch, 1909-1920" by W. Brooks Drayton Henderson is a poetry anthology written in the early 20th century. It gathers humorous and satirical verse from Punch magazine, framed by an introductory essay on the “Comic Spirit,” and ranges across pre-war high spirits, wartime endurance, and post-war readjustment. Expect agile light verse on love, London, sport, the sea, and university life alongside patriotic and elegiac notes from the war years.

The opening of the collection presents Henderson’s extended preface, a lively critical essay arguing that true comedy is the swift triumph of the small over the seemingly great, illustrated by examples from nursery rhyme, painting, fiction, and music, and then applied to the decade’s themes—suffrage, war, sport, fairies and ships, and national discipline—while flagging emblematic war pieces included in the volume. A prefatory note credits authors and publishers and is followed by a detailed contents list. The first run of poems showcases the range: a satirist’s origin story (“The School for Motley”), a plea for milder romance (“To the God of Love”), a comic domestic standoff amid suffragette tactics (“The New Resistance”), ragtime farewells, season-bound affections, and wry odes to wasps, daffodils, rosemary, and ducks. It then turns to sport and the outdoors—hunting, trout, rowing at Putney, hounds, cricket and golf—country shooting and even a jittery first aeroplane flight, before shifting to school and university pieces that cherish undergraduate rooms and record wartime Cambridge and Oxford transformed by khaki. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1922