ABSTRACT
Most literary proverb studies have dealt with the dramatic and prose works by such authors as William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Literary historians and folklorists both were under the wrong impression that lyrical verses would not be appropriate for bits of prosaic folk wisdom. And yet, the poetry of Edward Taylor (1642–1729), Alice Cary (1820–1871), Robert Frost (1875–1963), Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), W.H. Auden (1907–1973), and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer (b. 1941) contain ample proverbial wisdom in its traditional wording or in innovative variations. For two general studies see Charles Clay Doyle, “On Some Paremiological Verses,” Proverbium, no. 25 (1975), 979–982; and Wolfgang Mieder, “A Sampler of Anglo-American Proverb Poetry,” Folklore Forum, 13 (1980), 39–53.
