A comic English verse form of exactly four lines in two rhyming couplets of deliberately irregular meter, always naming a real or well-known person as its first line and building an absurd, biographically playful joke around them, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
Facts
Place of OriginEngland, 1905, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. 1 StructureFour lines in two rhyming couplets (AABB), of deliberately irregular and unequal line length, the first line naming the poem's subject. 1 Notable ExampleBentley's Biography for Beginners (1905), the first published collection of clerihews. 1 Connections
Form Of Genre
Comedy, Genres Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Sources
1. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Press
Wikipedia: Clerihew
Lead paragraph, structure
It has four lines of irregular length and metre for comic effect. The rhyme structure is A A B B;
Lead paragraph, subject line
The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person, and the remainder puts the subject in an absurd light or reveals something unknown or spurious about the subject.
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