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5 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, and messages attributed to various men and women suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. Studies of graffiti have often focused on particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems, and on specific political commentary. 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. (In this way too we could perhaps even see it as some kind of early incarnation of Twitter.) 4 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. 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. 3 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. Eliot’s claim that, to a certain extent, all poetry was a form of “defecation”. Were not Alexander Pope and Jonathan 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 (a somewhat literal prefiguring of T.
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Just as the compilers of a modern work, The Good Loo Guide, were parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown compilers of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation’s polite literature.
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