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Encyclopedia: Clerihew, Talk:Clerihew, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Talk:Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Clerihew (or clerihew) is a very specific kind of short humorous verse, typically with the following properties:
* It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; but it is hardly ever satirical, abusive or obscene
* It has four lines of irregular length (for comic effect)
* The first line consists solely (or almost solely) of a well-known person's name.
The form was invented by and is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. As a student, Bentley invented the clerihew on Humphry Davy (see below) during his studies, and it was a great hit with his friends. The first use of the word in print was in 1928.Oxford English Dictionary

Bentley's friend, G. K. Chesterton, was a practitioner of the clerihew and one of the sources of its popularity. However, other serious authors also produced clerihews, including W. H. Auden. Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous or otherwise lofty individuals and reposition them in an absurd or commonplace setting. The unbalanced and unpolished poetic meter and line length are parodic of the limerick (NPEPP 219). The chief literary form the clerihew parodies is that of eulogy and of schoolboy notes (which is its origin).

Examples

The first ever Clerihew:
:Sir Humphry Davy
:Abominated gravy.
:He lived in the odium
:Of having discovered sodium.

Another about a famous UK scientist:

:Sir James Dewar
:Is better than you are.
:None of you asses
:Can liquefy gases!

(Named as a Clarihew of the time in http://www.pet.cam.ac.uk/petreans/newsletter-2002/prospect.html)

:Edmund Clerihew Bentley
:Worked swiftly if not gently,
:Tracking murderers down by a hidden clew
:In whodunit and clerihew.

:Edmund Clerihew Bentley
:Mused, when he ought to have studied intently;
:It was this muse
:That inspired clerihews.

:Edmund Clerihew Bentley
:was evidently
:a man
:who could not get his verses to scan

:Carl Gustav Jung
:was very well hung,
:a fact which annoyed
:Sigmund Freud.

:Sir Karl Popper
:Perpetrated a whopper
:When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
:Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
: (by Armand T. Ringer)

:Sir Christopher Wren
:Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
:If anybody calls,
:Say I am designing St Paul's."

:John Stuart Mill,
:By a mighty effort of will,
:Overcame his natural bonhomie
:And wrote 'Principles of Political Economy'.

:Daniel Defoe
:Lived a long time ago
:He had nothing to do so
:He wrote Robinson Crusoe

:Alfred, Lord Tennyson
:Lived upon venison;
:Not cheap, I fear,
:Because venison's dear.
:(credited to Louis Untermeyer)

:George the Third
:Ought never to have occurred.
:One can only wonder
:At so grotesque a blunder.

:Paula Regnier
:Will have quite a career
:One can attest
:Via the size of her chest.
: (Credited to Paul D. Joachim)

:What I like about Clive
:Is that he is no longer alive.
:There is much to be said
:For being dead.

:Ted Hughes,
:Sylvias muse,
:was rather good-looking.
:Let his wife do the cooking.
: (Credited to Caroline Dworin)

:Charles Anthony Richard Hoare
:His books are always such a bore.
:Especially the most recent of his,
:Communicating Sequential Processes.

:Google Reader's
:built with electrons and leptons, meters and liters.
:We're off dealing with those particles
:so we can bring you your articles.
:(maintenance page seen on http://www.google.com/reader/view/, credited to Daniel Bentley)

Clerihews are occasionally not about a particular person, as in this example by Bentley:

:The Art of Biography
:Is different from Geography.
:Geography is about Maps,
:But Biography is about Chaps.

This is really a meta-Clerihew, as Clerihews are mini biographies.

:Ted Hughes
:Never wrote clerihews,
:It was his fate
:To become Poet Laureate.

Notes

*Teague, Frances. "Clerihew" in Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 219-220.

External links

*http://www.poetry4kids.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=8 How to write a Clerihew poem

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