Auden was a good clerihewist, but Robert is a great one! I think the trick is to come up with rhymes which are as unpredictable as they are inevitable. Let me demonstrate that inevitability with a good story. Alfred Nicol was driving Rhina and me back from a reading I'd given, and we fell to clerihewing. I quoted
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
was a modest man, evidently,
the only man whose claim to fame
resides in his middle name.
I attributed it to Bob, and Alfred said "You haven't quite got it right, and that's by me, not Mezey." Sure enough I'd seen Alfred's poem in The Formalist. And read Bob's poem in his Collected. Here's Bob's version:
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
was literary, evidently,
but his chief claim to fame
is his middle name.
Now this is not a case of plagiarism, folks. Each of these very funny men wrote damn near the same poem. Inevitably!
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