Everything in the paper, the speaker of "Megalomania" announces, is really about him. It is a classic delusion of grandeur, but the poem undercuts it almost as fast as it makes it. The speaker is more than a little ridiculous, and he seems to know it. What begins as a boast ends as a quiet portrait of a self that exists mostly as a set of headlines, and an incomplete set at that.
The opening couplet is built on a line break. "old news is about me" works as a complete claim, and "all of it" arrives afterward like an afterthought, which makes the claim bigger and sillier. "Old news" also carries a double meaning. It can be stale information, or it can be the speaker's whole past, filed and yellowing. The second couplet turns on itself: "superficial as I know / myself to be." The break after "know" lets the speaker seem briefly to claim self-knowledge before the line admits what he knows, which is his own shallowness. This is also the poem's only real rhyme, "me" in the first couplet against "be" in the second, and it links the swollen ego to the confession of emptiness. After that the rhyme disappears, as if the poem had no more interest in sounding neat.
From here the syntax changes. The poem has no verb after "is" and "know," only a list of noun phrases: "my vanity and liberty," "my many bad years," "any reverse." They read like headlines or captions, which suits a speaker who sees himself as news. "Vanity and liberty" is an odd pairing, held together by the shared -ity ending, and it hints that freedom, for this speaker, may be just another form of self-regard. The phrase "as drawn in the Times" is slippery too. "Drawn" suggests a cartoon or caricature, a likeness that exaggerates, and the poem never says which Times it means. The speaker is not described by the paper so much as sketched, and he accepts the sketch as himself.
The third couplet is the most interesting for its language. "my many bad years / grieved at or pissed upon" sets a formal register against a vulgar one. "Upon" gives the crude "pissed" a faintly legal, mock-solemn air, and "grieved at" is not quite idiomatic. We would normally grieve over or for something, so the phrase also hints at being aggrieved. The small word "or" matters as well. Other people's reactions to his bad years are split between sorrow and contempt, and the speaker cannot tell which he got, or does not care. Either way he is the object of attention, which is what a megalomaniac wants, even when the attention is unkind. The repeated "my" in these lines, "my vanity," "my many bad years," piles up possession like a man collecting his own clippings.
The last couplet changes the pronoun and the tone. "and any reverse / not fit to print" no longer says "my." The final failures belong to nobody, which fits their being unprinted. The phrase echoes the famous slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print," associated with the New York Times, and flips it into an admission of omission. "Reverse" also works two ways. It means a setback, a reversal of fortune, and it also means the back of a page or coin, the side that is not shown. The self on the front page is the flattering one, or at least the presentable one, and the poem ends by pointing toward what has been left out without ever saying what it is. We never learn what the "reverse" was.
That silence is what makes the poem worth reading. A reader might expect the final lines to reveal some secret humiliation. Instead the poem withholds it, and so it repeats the speaker's own habit of editing. Even in confessing, he controls the story, so his superficiality is a tidy performance, not a real exposure. The five unpunctuated, lowercase couplets keep the voice flat and offhand, almost bored, which makes the vanity more convincing than a loud boast would.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. In a few short lines it suggests how public stories flatter and omit, and how a person can start to believe the version of himself that gets printed. It also suggests that most of us, in our own heads, are the subject of all the news.