serene, light verse". On receiving advance notice from the Dial Press about publication of the book, Harvey Breit, a regular reviewer for The New York Times, was most impressed by "A Critical Appreciation of Morris Bishop" written (tongue in cheek, by Bishop himself) for the book, and wondered: "Is this the jacket copy to end all (non-factual) jacket copy?" The review of the book in The New York Times quoted Bishop on the aim of light verse (see above), and commented: "at that kind of understood misunderstanding, Mr. Bishop is one of the pre-eminentest". The Best of Bishop, a posthumous (1980) anthology by Charlotte Putnam Reppert, received a short and dismissive review in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the anonymous reviewer saying that Ogden Nash's poetry was "kinder" than Bishop's, James Thurber's was "droller", and "that of both – better". A much more favorable review by the poet John Ciardi started by remarking on Bishop's adeptness in "The Naughty Preposition" (also anthologized). Bishop's verse, he wrote: is without redeeming social significance, unless one is willing to count precision of language and with as a grace of civil exchange. Bishop is a master of the tongue. In his style guide The Complete Plain Words (1954), Bishop's poem "The Naughty Preposition" was awarded by Ernest Gowers "championship of the sport of preposition-piling". Like other writers, the linguist D. Gary Miller points out that the poem was "written in response to the nonsensical dictum against ending a sentence with a preposition"; but he adds that the degree of preposition-piling (seven consecutive prepositions) in its last line exemplifies "the creativity that makes art out of the ordinary" (and says that this was what first got him interested in linguistics). David McCord praised "The Naughty Preposition" as "tops" of poems exhibiting a particular skill of Bishop's: "a couple of seamless quatrains producing the effect of nonsense simply by an unexpected grouping of ordinary words, or by the threading of a string of them like beads in some unusual way". Bishop's obituary in The New York Times called Bishop an "authority" on limericks, and a very facile composer of them; Richard Armour wrote that he was "the only writer of light verse who has had any marked success with them in recent years". He wrote them prolifically: 29 appear in Spilt Milk, 28 in The Best of Bishop, and several even in his pseudonymous novel The Widening