witty verse", the poet David McCord listed a dozen personal favorites; "We Have Been Here Before" was one. Decades later, McCord praised Bishop's "technical skill" and "perfect ear" as displayed in the poem with those of Thomas Love Peacock as displayed in "The War Song of Dinas Vawr". Bishop's verse was collected in three volumes during his lifetime: Paramount Poems, Spilt Milk and A Bowl of Bishop. A newspaper review of Paramount Poems (1929, its title page reading " 'If it isn't a PARAMOUNT, it isn't a poem.' — Morris Bishop") found it entertaining: [Bishop's] ear and his taste are vigorous, rough, unsubtle. But he makes up as an entertainer for what he lacks as a poet. . . . He's the protagonist of an audible smile in every poem – preferably in the last line. . . . He's as fresh and wholesome as a crisp fall apple, and – thank God! – the blemish of whimsicality is not upon him. Stanley Edgar Hyman regarded Bishop's verse in his second collection, Spilt Milk (1942), together with Richard Armour's in Yours for the Asking, as typical of New Yorker light verse: "stock light-verse subjects" adding up to a dated "Light Verse Attitude", all making "an impression of flawless technical competence combined with a fine dose of boredom after reading more than a few poems at a sitting". Like Hyman, Thomas Sugrue found the subject matter of some of the poems dated. Rather than Bishop's dexterity with classical forms, Sugrue particularly appreciated both the results when Bishop "goes back to his country-boy days", and also Bishop's "Rabelaisian wit". Louis Untermeyer took a more favorable view of Spilt Milk. While conceding that "Mr. Bishop is not an originator", he wrote that "he equals and frequently surpasses such contemporary experts in deceptive casualness as F. .P. A., Arthur Guiterman, Norman Levy, Phyllis McGinley, and David McCord . . . one seldom encounters a book with so many examples of barbed humor, experienced (not innocent) merriment, and critical nonsense." Bishop's third verse collection, A Bowl of Bishop: Museum Thoughts and Other Verses (1954) starts with a recipe for a bowlful (for six). There are 18 "Museum Thoughts", each commenting on a work of art (reproduced on the same page). A review in the Buffalo Courier-Express said that in addition to these Museum Thoughts, the book includes "some 70 other gems of purest, if hardly