(It is significant that the first words Archy left in his machine were “expression is the need of my soul.”) The creation of Archy, whose communications were in free verse, was part inspiration, part desperation. He was impatient of hard work and humdrum restrictions, yet expression was the need of his soul. He never assembled a hard-hitting bunch of contributors and never tried to. Marquis, cramped by single-column width, produced his column largely without outside assistance. Adams, operating his “Conning Tower” in The World, moved in the commodious margins of column-and-a-half width and built up a reliable stable of contributors. Adams was a great editor, an insatiable proofreader, a good make-up man. Consequently Marquis was always hard up for stuff to fill his space. Marquis did not have the patience to adjust himself easily and comfortably to the rigors of daily columning, and he did not go about it in the steady, conscientious way that (for example) his contemporary Franklin P. The device of having a cockroach leave messages in his typewriter in the Sun office was a lucky accident and a happy solution for an acute problem. After about a lifetime of frightfully difficult literary labor keeping newspapers supplied with copy, he fell exhausted. Describing the coming of Archy in the “Sun Dial” column of the New York Sun one afternoon in 1916, he wrote: “After an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of poems which are always there in profusion.” In that sentence Don Marquis was writing his own obituary notice. He ended up in an exhausted condition – his money gone, his strength gone. He was the sort of poet who does not create easily he was left unsatisfied and gloomy by what he produced day and night he felt the juices squeezed out of him by the merciless demands of daily newspaper work he was never quite certified by intellectuals and serious critics of belles lettres. I know (or think I do) at what cost Don Marquis produced these gaudy and irreverent tales. It is funny, it is wise, it is tender, and it is tough. White Among books of humor by American authors, there are only a handful that rest solidly on the shelf … archy and mehitabel, hammered out at such awful cost by the bug hurling himself at the keys, is one of those books. Notes to Columbia Masterworks ML 4963 by E.B. to form an arch: elms arching over the road.Oops, looks like your browser doesn't support HTML 5 audio.to throw or make into the shape of an arch or vault.to cover with a vault, or span with an arch: the rude bridge that arched the flood.a chamber or opening in a glassmaking furnace.Civil Engineeringa dam construction having the form of a barrel vault running vertically with its convex face toward the impounded water.Clothinga device inserted in or built into shoes for supporting the arch of the foot.any overhead curvature resembling an arch.Architecturethe curved head of an opening, as a doorway.Architecturea doorway, gateway, etc., having a curved head.Architecturean upwardly curved construction, as of steel or timber functioning in the manner of a masonry arch.Architecturea curved masonry construction for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening.-arch- also appears with the meaning "first, earliest, original, oldest in time.'' This meaning is found in such words as: archaeology, archaic, archaism, archetype.
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