A Tree Grows, and Grows For more than half my life, I have been party to the ongoing burial of a literary reputation. Strangely enough, I don't think my victim entirely deserves it. One hundred years ago, in the August issue of Poetry magazine, Alfred Joyce Kilmer published "Trees." This stubbornly enduring work needs no introduction. Even the smallest schoolchild can lisp: "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." Come Arbor Day, every two-bit garden club recites "Trees" as it plants a sapling; Alfalfa Switzer crooned it - or rather, whined it - in a memorable "Our Gang" short. Of course, "Trees" is a notoriously awful poem. It is singsongy and saccharine. Its imagery is preposterous. As Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks pointed out in their book, "Understanding Poetry," any anthropomorphic flora "whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth's sweet flowing breast" as it "looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray" would be "strangely deformed" indeed. The thing has yielded innumerable parodies. "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all," Ogden Nash wrote in "Song of the Open Road." He signed his spoof "Joyce Killer-Diller." In the movie "Superman II," when Valerie Perrine declares, "I like "Trees," " Gene Hackman responds, "So does your average cocker spaniel." I have been a member of that critical chorus since 1985. That was when I revived an ancient Columbia University literary society called Philolexian, whose alumni include Jacques Barzun (class of 1927), Allen Ginsberg (1948), Merton (1938) and Kilmer himself (1908). One of my accomplices in this enterprise, Michael Kaufmann - now a respectable professor of English at Temple University - joked that we should conduct a wretched poetry competition in Kilmer's honor. And so we have. Every fall, up to 300 Columbia students pack Philolexian's annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest to hear original doggerel composed by their classmates that is intended to produce laughter, cringes or sheer disbelief. Here's a fragment from "The Ballad of Sweet Donna Lee," by Everett Patterson, which took the laurels in 2003: A great swell of music arose in his breast His heart, like an alien, leapt from his chest His soul, like a joy-bomb, exploded with joy At that moment, gladdest of all freshman boys. The evening culminates in a thunderous group chant of Kilmer's magnum opus, with particular emphasis on "Poems are made by fools like me" - which Heywood Broun called not only "a wholly spurious humility" but also "the most insincere line ever written by mortal man." Had poor Kilmer never published anything besides "Trees," the modernist intelligentsia would still have pilloried him for its 80 trite words alone. As it is, he turned out several volumes of verse before he was killed on the Western Front on July 30, 1918, at age 31. Most of his work, like "Trees," was simplistic and sappy. In "Delicatessen," Kilmer finds that merely by plying his humble trade, a deli owner is somehow angelic: "He fights, and for his fireside's sake; / He fights for clothing and for bread: / The lances of his foemen make / A steely halo round his head." Note the halo. Central to both Kilmer's work and the prevailing disdain of it is his deep Catholicism, to which he converted after his daughter Rose contracted infantile paralysis. Most of his efforts fairly drip with piety, even when the subject is as mundane as New Jersey mass transit. The train in "The Twelve-Forty-Five" is an instrument of the Devil ("I ride, I blasphemously ride / Through all the silent countryside"), disturbing the peaceful faith of the Garden State ("Why, even strident Paterson / Rests quietly as any nun"). In the end, though, the wicked locomotive receives absolution ("My cottage lamp shines white and clear. / God bless the train that brought me here"). This sort of stuff was unlikely to survive the arrival of Prufrock. Thomas Vinciguerra, the editor of "Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs From The New Yorker," is writing a biography of Gibbs and his circle.