Poetry

Ambrose Bierce is remembered for The Devil's Dictionary and his cold, ironic Civil War stories — but through the long San Francisco decades when he earned his living as a newspaperman, the rhymed lampoon was one of his standing weapons. This collection gathers his verse: the satirical and the serious, the comic and the savage, the throwaway epigram and the carefully polished poem.

The dominant note is attack. Bierce trains his contempt on corrupt politicians, railroad magnates, pious humbugs, temperance crusaders, and the comfortable hypocrisies of respectable society, naming names and trusting the wit to carry past the local occasion. The natural form is the epigram — a flattering setup, then a final turn that demolishes it — handled with the polish of a writer who had studied Pope and Swift and learned to make the snap of a closing rhyme sound like a trap shutting.

Beneath the satire runs a colder current: mock-epitaphs and genuine elegies, meditations on death, oblivion, and the vanity of fame, shot through with the metaphysical pessimism that was the foundation of Bierce's whole sensibility. The man who mocked false epitaphs knew exactly what an honest one would have to say — and his own end, vanished into revolutionary Mexico in 1913 with no grave at all, was a final irony he would have appreciated.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on Bierce's verse, its satirical character, and its craft, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.