Form

The Clerihew

Short Lyric and Epigrammatic Forms

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 Origin
England, 1905, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. 1
Structure
Four lines in two rhyming couplets (AABB), of deliberately irregular and unequal line length, the first line naming the poem's subject. 1
Notable Example
Bentley's Biography for Beginners (1905), the first published collection of clerihews. 1
Mode
Poetry 2
Structure
Fixed Form 3
Connections

Form Of Genre

Comedy, Genres
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In the Other Atlases

Originated In

United Kingdom

Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.

Source Wikipedia: Clerihew
Sources
1. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Press
  • Place of Origin: England, 1905, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
  • Structure: Four lines in two rhyming couplets (AABB), of deliberately irregular and unequal line length, the first line naming the poem's subject.
  • Notable Example: Bentley's Biography for Beginners (1905), the first published collection of clerihews.
2. 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.
  • Lead paragraph
    is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem
View the Source
3. Poets.org (Academy of American Poets): Clerihew
Poets.org (Academy of American Poets)Glossary entry, sentence on structure
Quote, Glossary entry, sentence on structure
Page submenu block find poems find poets poem-a-day literary seminars materials for teachers poetry near you Clerihew is a whimsical, skewed quatrain poem-, two rhyming couplets ( aabb) of unequal length about a person’s biography.
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