Mabit1, Wikimedia Commons// CC BY-SA 4.0 Taft he called 'flubdub' most Enthusiastically Bryan he labeled a 'Human trombone.' 3. Higgledy-piggledy Theodore Roosevelt Loved to sling barbs he dreamed Up on his own.

Here’s an example, based on Theodore Roosevelt’s iconic insults of William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan: This can be anywhere in the poem, but Hecht preferred it as the sixth line. One of the six-syllable lines must be one word.The last line of the first stanza must rhyme with the last line of the second.Matthew McConaughey does Kareem Abdul-Jabbar doesn’t.) (Again, it has to be a double dactyl, so not every six-syllable name works. The second line must be someone’s name.The first line must be nonsense, often higgledy-piggledy or jiggery-pokery.So each of these lines is technically a double dactyl, hence the name of this type of poem.) The last line of each stanza only includes the first four syllables of a double dactyl, so: one stressed, then two unstressed, then one stressed.ĭouble dactyl poems have a few other requirements, too: (A dactyl is a group of three syllables where the first is stressed, and the second two are unstressed. The first three lines each have six syllables, with stress on the first and fourth syllables. The double dactyl comprises two quatrains with the same meter. In 1951, with the help of editor Naomi Pascal and her husband, classics scholar Paul Pascal, poet Anthony Hecht devised a new type of poem that echoed the brevity and wittiness of clerihews with a little more focus on form. It should be about a person, whom you name in the first line.The first two lines should rhyme, and the last two lines should rhyme.To qualify as a traditional clerihew, your poem must follow these rules: In fact, clerihews are often intentionally arrhythmic (and not quite historically accurate) to make them seem more juvenile and therefore funnier. In some publications, Bentley replaced detested with abominated or was not fond of, which is a good indicator of just how little he cared about meter in these particular poems. He lived in the odium Of having discovered Sodium.

Its subject was Sir Humphry Davy (which Bentley spelled as Humphrey), the early 19th-century chemist credited with discovering sodium and other elements. The clerihew is named for its inventor, English writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who remembered penning his first one as a teenager in school during the 1890s. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less fun. Clerihews, than-bauks, and these other poetic forms haven’t quite achieved the same level of fame. The tidy five-seven-five syllable format of a haiku has made it another especially popular type of poem around the world. Thanks to Shakespeare (and Petrarch before him), there’s a good chance you’ve heard of sonnets-even if you can’t exactly recall what makes a sonnet a sonnet.

Funny sonnet examples by students