Light poetry

This is from Tuesday’s Writer’s Almanac:

It's the birthday of poet Thomas Hood, born in London (1799). His early poetry was serious and romantic, but then in 1825 he anonymously published a collection of comic poems called Odes and Addresses to Great People (1825), which poked fun at many famous writers and thinkers of his day. The book was enormously successful; Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the puns as "transcendent." Hood tried all his life to write serious poems, but he is best remembered today for his comic verse, collected in books such as Whims and Oddities (1827) and Whimsicalities (1844).

He wrote, "'Lives' of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, / That we too many leave behind us— / Letters that we ought to burn."

It makes you stop and think doesn’t it.