Nonsense Verse for Adults

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Belloc, Hilaire. New Cautionary Tales. Illustrated by Nicolas Bentley. Duckworth & Co., 1930.

When does childhood end and adulthood begin? As far as biology is concerned, we cross a line that we can never recross when we are able to reproduce ourselves. Legally, too, there is a clearly defined moment at which we become adults forever. We like to believe that there is a similar one-way door between how children and adults speak, think, and behave. And yet no matter how much we grow up physically, we never entirely grow out of how we were in the first years of life. As Michelle Ann Abate notes in her book No Kids Allowed: Children’s Literature for Adults, our lives are not entirely unidirectional; in some ways, they are “recursive, looping, and twisting back around” on themselves.

Whether that’s good or bad depends on the context, but the Prelutsky Collection contains many examples of nonsense verse for adults—works that can be interpreted as celebrating the open border between childhood and adulthood. On the surface, at least, these poems are a lighthearted form of play with no serious instructional purpose. They’re simply meant to entertain. The sound and rhythm of language plays a big part in this. Nonsense poems take us back to childhood, when we may not have understood all the words mom and dad were reading to us, but we enjoyed the experience anyway. Other poems, in contrast, are sophisticated displays of verbal pyrotechnics that depend on adult understanding, none more so than Alliterative Anomalies for Infants and Invalids (1913) by John Cowie and William Hammond. Written in the form of an abecedarium, each poem is a tautogram, a text in which every word begins with the same letter. “R” is represented by the “Riotous rabble’s rowdy ringleader running rapidly right round rotund Robert’s really rather restricted reach.”

Nevertheless, nonsense verse for adults can also provide a platform for social critique. Many of these poems are burlesques, a literary genre that uses humor to call attention to social issues either by presenting serious subjects in a comical way or comical subjects in a serious way. One interpretation of nonsense verse is that it is a caricature of didactic poetry for children, where adults used lofty language to try to get kids to adhere to ideals that most adults ignored. It exposes adults’ hypocrisy. At the same time, it may also be trying to suggest that adults are no better—and possibly worse—than children when it comes to believing nonsense to be true simply because it sounds smart or polished or because they heard it from “an expert” or “an authority.”

One of the major writers of nonsense verse for grownups was Hilaire Belloc. A fervent Catholic, he rejected the materialist doctrine, widely held in Victorian times and ever since, that science and technology will one day solve the problem of human nature. Belloc was also an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist, and a critic of the British Establishment. His tongue-in-cheek collections of cautionary tales leave readers wondering whether they ought to be suspicious of everything else they’ve been told to believe, too.

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Douglas, Lord Alfred. Tails with a Twist. Illustrated by E. T. Reed. Edward Arnold, 1898.