Blogger Patrick Kurp, of Houston, posted an entry today titled “As Big, Perhaps, as Four Oxen” on his site, Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life.

“Handicapping literary reputations is a mug’s game,” he writes, “but if I were calculating John Updike’s odds, I’d bet on a handful of his stories, reviews and poems—especially the poems. Leave the novels alone, as readers and critics seldom did during his lifetime.”

Kurp calls Updike’s “a poetry of wit” and cites “The Menagerie at Versailles in 1775” as a prime example.