Richard Armour’s Foreword to Ethel Jacobson’s I’ll Go Quietly:

Light verse is an exacting art, demanding technical perfection, precision in the choice of words, and a nimble wit. But these are merely tools. More important is the requisite attitude toward life and toward oneself, a sense of the comic, the ability to detect the incongruous and the absurd.

Ethel Jacobson is one of the best modern practitioners of an art that began, in English, with Chaucer. She is a light verse writer’s light verse writer, able to cram much into few words, well-versed as well as well-versified, respectful of the requirements of her craft. What she has to say is as fresh and unexpected as the way she says it. Hers is the sharpness, not of claws, but of a keen and observant mind.

She sees the defects of the human race, but merely records them without bitterness and without preachment. (“If you know a better race,” she suggests, “go join it.”) All through her work runs a genuine regard for people, animals, and nature, wild or tame. She is capable of high satire and sparkling fun, but the fun, almost invariably, turns on herself. This is not only the kind of poet but the kind of person Ethel Jacobson is.

Her verses, in the thousands, have appeared in leading national periodicals. Her rhymes have been collected — not calm and collected, just collected — in two previous volumes, Larks in My Hair, and Mice in the Ink.

Here, now, is another volume of bright, skillful lines in the best tradition of an ancient and honorable art.