A clerihew is a short, four-line poem about a person's life. It was created by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line usually names a famous person, and the other lines describe them in a funny or unusual way. The poem follows an AABB rhyme pattern, but the rhymes are often not perfect. The lines are not all the same length, and the rhythm is not regular. Bentley made up the clerihew while in school and later shared it in books. One famous example from 1905 is shown here.

Form

A clerihew has these characteristics:

• It is about real people, often famous ones, and uses a funny or playful tone to show them in an unusual way
• It has four lines that vary in length and rhythm to create humor
• The rhyme pattern is AABB, meaning the first two lines rhyme with each other, and the last two lines rhyme with each other. The words are often carefully chosen to make the rhyme work, sometimes using phrases from Latin, French, or other languages
• The first line includes the person's name, and sometimes the name is the only part of that line. A 1960s letter from The Spectator stated that Bentley believed a true clerihew must have the name at the end of the first line, because rhyming difficult names was a key challenge

Clerihews are not mean or critical, but they place famous people in silly, outdated, or everyday situations, often with simple or slightly confusing descriptions.

Practitioners

The clerihew was created by and is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. When Bentley was a 16-year-old student at St Paul's School in London, he wrote the first clerihew about Humphry Davy during a science class. He and his classmates wrote many clerihews in a notebook. The first time the word "clerihew" appeared in print was in 1928. Bentley published three books of clerihews: Biography for Beginners (1905), which was published under the name "edited by E. Clerihew"; More Biography (1929); and Baseless Biography (1939), which included clerihews originally published in Punch and illustrated by Bentley's son, Nicolas Bentley.

G.K. Chesterton, a friend of Bentley, also wrote clerihews and helped make the form popular. Chesterton added verses and illustrations to the original notebook and to Biography for Beginners. Other serious writers, such as W.H. Auden, also wrote clerihews. The clerihew remains a popular humorous form among writers and readers. Today, the satirist Craig Brown often uses clerihews in his columns for The Daily Telegraph.

Examples

Bentley's first clerihew, published in 1905, was written about Sir Humphry Davy: The original poem had the second line "Was not fond of gravy"; but the published version has "Abominated gravy." Other clerihews by Bentley include: W. H. Auden's book Academic Graffiti (1971) includes: The satirical magazine Private Eye noted Auden's work and responded: Alan Turing, one of the founders of computing, was the subject of a clerihew written by the pupils of his alma mater, Sherborne School in England: A clerihew appreciated by chemists is cited in Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes, and regards the inventor of the thermos bottle (or Dewar flask): The version in Biography for Beginners says "condense" rather than "liquefy." Dark Sun also features a clerihew about the German-British physicist and Soviet nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs: In 1983, Games magazine ran a contest titled "Do You Clerihew?" The winning entry was:

Other uses of the form

The clerihew form has also been used for verses that are not about people's lives. In 1905, Bentley began his book Biography for Beginners with an example titled "Introductory Remarks," which discusses the subject of biography itself. The third edition of this book, published in 1925, includes a "Preface to the New Edition" made up of 11 stanzas, each written in clerihew form. One of these stanzas is included.