Casey at the Bat
local bards. Then the song birds on the city papers began to sign their names to it, and pretty soon you could get a rise out of Phinnie by asking which of the poets he lifted it from.
In final proof of Mr. Thayer's claim there is the internal evidence of the poem itself, and if there were no affidavits or other evidence at all, it would be sufficient. Mr. D'Vys claims that he wrote the last eight stanzas, and that somebody else tacked on the first five; he even made the remarkable assertion that he was convinced that the person who had written those five stanzas was the same one who had picked up the notebook full of his verses which he (D'Vys) had carelessly left lying on a bench in Cambridge Common, "because he used the names I ever used in all my baseball rhymes."
This, of course, is too puerile for words; and an examination of the poem will convince any one that it was written by one man. It is an entity in style and manner. More than that, the poem is incomplete without the first five stanzas, which describe the situation at the moment Casey goes to bat and are necessary to an understanding of it.
So the case seems complete.
The only rift in it is furnished by the reminiscences of De Wolf Hopper. He writes:
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