Word: clerihews
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...COMPLETE CLERIHEWS OF E. CLERIHEW BENTLEY; Oxford; 145 pages; $12.95. In 1890 a 16-year-old schoolboy at St. Paul's in London was touched by a slightly disheveled muse. He wrote...
Thus was born the first clerihew, the brainchild of Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Bentley went on to write detective novels, including Trent's Last Case (1912), and to compose editorials for the Daily Telegraph. But his fame was ensured by those dotty four-line biographies that kept punctuating his otherwise respectable existence. He lived to see his middle name enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary...
...Complete Clerihews gathers all 140 examples of the master's voice, along with the drawings that accompanied their publication (Bentley's illustrators included O.K. Chesterton and his own son Nicolas). This collection helps define the form. Unlike the limerick, its distant relative, the clerihew does not accommodate bawdiness or strong feelings of any other kind. Liberal in spirit, with some upper-class conservative leanings, Bentley roundly detested the Nazis. Yet his clerihew on the subject mocks rather than jeers...
...Clerihew Bentley...