Word: limerick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book whacked together on a long weekend. The original novel required readers interested only in literary privy-peeping to wear out their forefingers spelling through long passages devoted, with some success, to such matters as scene-setting and characterization. Return has little more scene-setting than a limerick, and the characterization is negligible. The meat of the book is as strong-flavored as bear steak-"Jennifer lay awake in the dark, smiling. She touched the welts on her thighs, running her fingers over them hard so that the pain burned all through her and her teeth gleamed white...
Maddened Elephant. Went a famed limerick of the period: There's a wonder/24 family called Stein -There's Gert and there's Ep and there...
...various points in this book, the reader learns that Graves has "bitter black Protestant blood," inherited from a grandfather, the last Protestant Bishop of Limerick; that at his home in Majorca he writes 500 words a day with a steel nib; that he dislikes Guggenheim fellowships ("When I was young . . . one didn't expect to be publicly supported just because one happened to write unsaleable verse"); and that he likes to test a poet's verboseness by summarizing stanzas in cablese, e.g., Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper": SOLITARY HIGHLAND LASS REAPING BINDING GRAIN STOP MELANCHOLY SONG OVERFLOWS...
...melancholy reflection that Thackeray's lost limerick about the Countess Guiccioli might have gained him a greater literary immortality than his shelf of great novels. May I suggest...
...Gogarty, the "stately plump Buck Mulligan" of Ulysses. Recalls Stanislaus of his brother: "I hated to see him glossy-eyed and slobbery-mouthed." Gogarty confessed to another friend that he wanted "to make Joyce drink in order to break his spirit," and celebrated the occasions of sin with a limerick...