It’s possible — OK, likely — that my life as an even semi-serious poet was ruined by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Because once I started writing clerihews, once I started concocting my own fanciful biographies in the Bentley-approved AABB fashion, I couldn’t see much reason to write anything else. Sometimes I have the not-quite-doctoral-committee-approved thought that all poems, all short stories, all plays, all everything, would be better if reduced to a clerihew. (Or at the very least, made shorter. From X. J. Kennedy’s “Famous Poems Abbreviated”: “Once upon a midnight dreary, / Blue and lonesome, missed my dearie. / Would I find her? Any hope? / Quoth the raven six times, ‘Nope.'”) Auden wrote tremendous clerihews, as did Dorothy Parker and George Starbuck. But today is Bentley’s birthday — he’s 135 — and what’s more, it’s Clerihew Day (no joke: it’s wedged between National Sugar Cookie Day and National Cheer Up the Lonely Day). So let’s turn to the original specimens, written in a form that Willard Espy described as “the ideal put-down: gentle, compassionate, unanswerable.”
(And many thanks to the patient souls at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library, one of whom helped me photograph the G. K. Chesterton illustrations that appear in Bentley’s 1905 collection, Biography for Beginners.)
***
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.
***
SIR HUMPHRY DAVY
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered Sodium.
***
FRANCOIS LISZT
The Abbe Liszt
Hit the piano with his fist.
That was the way
He used to play.
***
LORD CLIVE
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.
***
JAN VAN EYCK
The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, and not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.
***
Cheers, then. Now go write a clerihew — or seven, or ninety, or a hundred thirty-five (and light a candle for each). Being ruined ain’t so bad.
