Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is the centerpiece of Underwood's estimable, if fetish-fueled treatise on pogonology, or the study of whiskers and associated lore. First published in England on the eve of The Great War, this quaint publication takes the reader on a fascinating excursion through such topics as False Beards, Merkins, and Capillamenta (chin wigs); Effusions of the Scalp and Face; Celebrated Chaetognaths (chaetognathous = hairy-jawed); and even includes an affectionate mini-essay about the wooly mammoth! Poets Ranked by Beard Weight forms a special section devoted to bewhiskered bards.
In forming crinoid comparisons amongst
these august worthies, our self-appointed arbiter of all things fuzzy and
frizzy applies a grading system structured as a sliding scale he has
unassumingly named the Underwood Pogonometric Index. This admirable instrument
of scientific classification gauges the presence and projection of a
"galvanic imponderable" Underwood calls poetic gravity -- an
intangible property which results from the aesthetic "charge" of the
beard itself rather than from any intrinsic ability or merit attaching to the
wearer in question or to his literary productions. Underwood's index is
intended as an adjunct to broad-based beard typology, which tends to focus on
detailed physical features such as kinks, curls, knots and braids, and on their
qualitative differences, as between bristles and vibrissae or the wispy versus
the filamentous. As in his earlier work Whiskers of the World, Underwood
touches on such diverse matters as beard hygiene and methods for perfuming,
diagrams how the ancient Assyrians anchored their beards with ornamental
weights, points out how beards were thought to shield against evil, and
outlines an axiom of general beard theory called crinous consequence --
the relationship between history's highest civilizations and the hirsute
grandeur of their male populations. Next, the study establishes the
inseparability of the perception of the emphatically bearded physiognomy from
the indelible image of the biblical prophets and, plausibly if not altogether
convincingly, cites this phenomenon as an explanation of the prevalent
nineteenth century idea that the poet is an agent of clairvoyance and an
intermediary between mortals and oracular messengers from a higher plane.