Farewell to Poetry.

Dr. Eisenberg, who died on Tuesday at 99, was for more than a decade one of the most prolific contributors of reader comments on nytimes.com — and, by extension, on the internet as a whole.

But what distinguished him even more than his prodigious output (more than 13,000 comments since 2008) was the form those comments took: verse — mostly limericks — perfectly rhymed, (usually) metrically impeccable and always germane to whatever recent news item had caught his eye.

Dr. Eisenberg’s verse made him a cult figure in the lively, atomized, fiercely opinionated parallel universe of The New York Times’s online commenters. As Andrew Rosenthal, then the editorial page editor of The Times, wrote in 2012, Dr. Eisenberg was “the closest thing this paper has to a poet in residence.”

from the New York Times 

The time has now come to decree

I'm done with this darn poetry.

The visual arts

will now be my darts

to skewer all iniquity.

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