Distinguished poet and critic John Hollander offers, for the first time ever, a buoyant guided tour of American light verse-a tradition he delightfully pursues from Ambrose Bierce's sardonic <I>The Devil's Dictionary</I> quatrains to the latter-day comic inventions of Edward Gorey, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill. Along the way, <I>American Wits</I> gathers a rich harvest of couplets, clerihews, epigrams, parodies, burlesques, and other forms of fractured verse. The varied and often surprising list of contributors includes Edwin Arlington Robinson, Don Marquis, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Morley, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, and Anthony Hecht.