William H. Wiatt on Clerihews

Henry Taylor, Brief Candles, with illustrations by Heather Alexander. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

          John Stuart Mill,
          By a mighty effort of will,
          Overcame his natural bonhomie
          And wrote Principles of Political Economy. 

     That’s a clerihew—a humorous “biography” in two couplets—by the inventor of the genre, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Henry Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, following the tradition established by Bentley, W. H. Auden, and Paul Horgan, offers us 101 clerihews, his Brief Candles. 
     Unlike limericks, which are written by anybody (mostly by old “Anon.”) about everyman (“There was a young man from …”) and to everybody, clerihews are written by literati, about particular persons, and to a narrow, educated audience. Auden identifies that audience in calling his clerihews “academic graffiti.” They tend, in short, to be “in jokes”; if you don’t know who the subject (e.g., John Stuart Mill) is, you may well miss the point.
     In Brief Candles, Henry Taylor chooses primarily literary figures—British poets laureate, suicidal poets, literary theorists, critics and linguists, and book reviewers. But some well-read readers may have trouble identifying these seven worthies, all subjects of clerihews in Brief Candles: Sven Birkerts, Eustace Budgell, Helene Cixous, Laurence Eusden, Michiko Kakutani, Henry James Pye, and Richard Tillinghast. How many did you get?
     Fortunately, Taylor writes about other groups—Jesus’ disciples, sitting supreme court justices, President Clinton and his intimates, and a mixed bag, from Friedrich Nietsche to Ann Landers. Unfortunately, some of these run into problems. For example, it isn’t easy to be funny about the disciples.

          John
          believed on the Son,
          ate the bread of life,
          and avoided strife.

     Whatever else may be said for it, that’s not a clerihew, despite the form; and the John/Son rhyme does not pass muster. The best of this group—

          Judas Iscariot
          missed the sweet chariot
          That swung pretty low
          In his wasteland of woe.

—begins well, but the last line is dead weight.
     Some of the dead white poets laureate are brought to life in Taylor’s verses. We don’t need to know much more about Thomas Warton than his dates (1728-90) to appreciate this:

          Thomas Warton
          never met Dolly Parton.
          It made him quite surly
          to have been born too early.

     That’s pure Bentley.
     Many others are notable for ingenious rhymes or clever twists, both evident in this one:

          Noam Chomsky
          worked over such phrases as “bum ski”
          and “ski bum,” applying generative grammar
          and a ballpeen hammer.

     My favorite treats the inventor of the telephone:

          Alexander Graham Bell
          has shuffled off this mobile cell.
          He’s not talking any more
          But he has a lot to answer for.

That’s pure genius. It makes reading Taylor’s little book worth the candle.