Felicia Lamport (1916 – 23 December 1999), was an American poet and satirist who also wrote a column for The Boston Globe called "Muse of the Week in Review".[1] She was particularly well known for her inventive use of the pun.
Lamport was born in New York in 1916 and graduated from Vassar College in 1937, after which she worked as a reporter and wrote dialogue for MGM films.
Her first collection of poetry, Mink on Weekdays (Ermine on Sunday) was published in 1950 and became a best seller. It was followed by other poetry collections including Scrap Irony (1961), Cultural Slag (1966) and Political Plumlines (1984). Lamport's Globe column first appeared 1981 but her work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and other publications.
In 1942 she married Benjamin Kaplan (April 11, 1911 – August 18, 2010) an American copyright scholar who was to become a justice in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Kaplan was notable as being "one of the principal architects" of the Nuremberg trials.
She was particularly remembered for The Love Song of R. Milhous Nixon, in which she borrowed from T. S. Eliot's poem with a similar title to lampoon the President, at the height of the 1973 Watergate scandal in 1973. The poem began:
In 1961 Time Magazine reviewed her book Scap Irony thus: “The pun also rises. Too much maligned as the lowest form of humor, it can soar for a brief moment. And in good hands, words can be made to jump, molt, wiggle, shrink, flash, collide, fight, strut, and turn themselves inside out or upside down.”[2]
Lamport died on 23 December 1999, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 83. She was survived by her husband, their son James Kaplan of Northampton, Massachusetts, their daughter Nancy Mansbach of Newton, Massachusetts, and by four grandchildren.