Boris Johnson is campaigning in
nonsense verse. In the final hustings last night he held up a kipper to highlight how EU laws were infringing the rights of fishermen in the Isle of Man.
"A daily 'enchanted hour' - even if it's only 20 minutes - is a chance to share with your children the stories you loved, to voyage with them through stories that are new to both of you, to introduce them to myths, fables, fairy tales, poetry, non-fiction, trickster stories,
nonsense verse, picture-book biographies, classic novels, and any other writing I may have missed.
Those in English discuss Proustian masquerades: I or not-I, prosody as field of play: a neglected issue in the translation of
nonsense verse, and odd men in: the 2011 film Intouchables.
It begins with familiar
nonsense verse words to a popular tune, then gradually evolve into something quite different from the original verse, For example, the lines "Can you use them to go spying?
Others are so enigmatic as to seem at first reading like
nonsense verse: 'Like a tortoise/searching for a husband/you search the orchard/for the perfect plum', or appear to offer wisdom: 'when you're young, you neither know nor care/that being young is nothing but the dream/of someone who's too young to be old enough/to be the woman she's too young to be'.
In "Rhyme," Michael Campbell reprises the same appreciation for fun that informs his argument in Irish Poetry Under the Union when he uses
nonsense verse from Tennyson and Edward Lear to frame his discussion of some of the ways in which "issues of naturalness of speech and comic incongruity which lie behind many considerations of rhyme were pressing for the sense of craft practiced by the Victorian poets" (75).
London, June 5 ( ANI ): John Lennon's books and manuscripts of parodies,
nonsense verse and poetry have sold for record high prices at Sotheby's New York.
This is perhaps most noticeable in the context of nonrepresentational art such as Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Lewis Carroll's
nonsense verse. The Supreme Court has reassuringly declared these to be "unquestionably shielded" by the First Amendment.8 But far from being unquestionable, their shielding in fact raises questions that are, as Mark Tushnet generously puts it, "quite difficult to answer satisfactorily." (9)
The
Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear was reissued this year in a beautifully illustrated hardback.
His
nonsense verse therefore frequently employs the pleasant sound effects of nursery rhymes, though some of his limericks can be violent:
4 What J is the name of Lewis Carroll's
nonsense verse about a fictitious monster in the novel Through the Looking Glass?
Within the broad spectrum of
nonsense verse is also a style of writing that places eve- rything back to front, or contrary to common sense ("I went around a straight crooked cor- ner and saw a dead donkey die"), rendering the world absurd and defying logical reason- ing.The nonsense world has no system of logic, which is what makes it memorable.