A form of comic
verse invented by
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (
1875-
1956). It lacks
meter but has a fixed
rhyme scheme of aabb - two rhyming
couplets. The clerihew succinctly sums up a subject or character:
The art of
Biography
Is different from
Geography.
Geography is about
maps,
But Biography is about
chaps.
But the clerihew at its most infamous is a witty and largely uninformative miniature biography:
Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser,
But this never harmed the sales
Of his
Canterbury Tales.