Critics' Reviews

"One comes back to Mrs. Parker's light verse with the greatest pleasure; with its sharp wit, its clean bite, its perfectly conscious - hence delightful - archness, it stands re-reading amply. Here her high technical polish has great virtue... But what, of course, is more important is the sense of personality that converts what might otherwise be merely a witty idea into a dramatic, however, cockeyed, situation; a sense of personality that gives us not cynicism in the abstract but laughter applied to an objective. There is no one else in Mrs. Parker's special field who can do half as much."
- Louis Kronenberger. NYT. Dec. 13,1936. p.28 (Curley et. al.)

"More certain than either death or taxes is the high and shining art of Dorothy Parker... Bitterness, humor, wit, yearning for beauty and love, and a foreknowledge of their futility - with rue her heart is laden, but her lads are gold-plated - these, you might say, are the elements of the Parkerian formula; these, and the divine talent to find the right word and reject the wrong one. The result is a simplicity that almost startles."
-Franklin P. Adams. NYHT. June 14, 1931. p. 7 (Curley et. al.)

"Length doesn't increase depth, necessarily, and just because her little characterizations of a book were short doesn't mean they weren't true. The reason a lot of them stuck, probably, is because they had some truth."
-Gloria Steinem.  "Would You Kindly Direct Me to Hell?: The Infamous Dorothy Parker." Stage production. Arts & Entertainment Television, 1994. (Lebowitz.)


"For obvious reasons, Dorothy Parker's poetry has been appreciated for its humor, its modern satirical view toward romantic love and heterosexual relationships. Her work is also associated with a New York style of urban sophistication. Thanks to the recovery and delineation by feminist scholars of writings by women in the nineteenth century, particularly those writings in the sentimental tradition, we can now read Parker's poetry in a much broader literary and cultural context.

Many of Parker's poems use elements found in the sentimental tradition: rhyme and meter, accessible language, familiar content, a desire to instruct, an implicit desire for human bonding, an adherence to feminine propriety, and a retreat from both world and work. Her religious poems and some of her poems about death do not close with the kind of clever epigram for which she is famous. Other poems use concision, suggestion rather than explanation, decadent imagery, and an urbane, sophisticated attitude to pull away from or critique nineteenth-century literary and cultural values. One of her earliest poems, "Any Porch" (1921), illustrates this collision of values in its use of fragmented, disembodied voices contained in rhymed and metered stanzas.

Parker's poetry has been ignored by historians of modernism because of its content, form, and publishing venue (mass circulation magazines and newspapers rather than the literary "little magazines"). She preferred formal verse; the only times she used free verse were to mock the form and in her Hate Songs. Thus, she did not appear to be experimenting with or developing a new form. If we consider, however, that modernism embodies more than just technical experimentation, we can appreciate the collision of values found in Parker's poetry for what they are. Dorothy Parker is an important transitional figure in both modernism and the tradition of women's poetry."
-Rhonda Pettit. A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. (Breese et. al.)