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I understand you will use my personal data to improve services and send me marketing communications You must consent to the storage and use of your personal data as laid out in our privacy notice. If you’ve enjoyed reading about Isaac Asimov and his dirty limericks, please consider sharing the post or subscribing to the blog. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. Lack of subtlety: A smart limerick can be dirty through suggestion and innuendo, rather than being blunt and obvious.On the other hand, Housman did have the compensation (not given to the rest of us) of knowing he’d composed one of the most heartbreaking tiny poems in the language. The humour is not in the “punch line” ending but rather in the tension between meaning and its lack. I raised the question with Better World Books and although they could not supply a hardcover version they were extremely generous in making up for the descepency. You must have quite a refined taste for historical and high wit, for you are about to be delighted (as well as tormented) by the word play! I was prepared for Wendy Cope when she arrived in my adulthood, because in my elementary school days some literary sophisticates among my chums introduced me to Miss Susie, whose adventures can be found in nineteen variant episodes in Wikipedia.

In Sidney, too, we find a cry for simplicity housed within an elaborate construction: an exactly rhymed sonnet in iambic hexameter. There’s a modest brilliance at the heart of Emily Dickinson’s credo: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Much legal writing, especially the writing of contracts, is devoted to stripping language of ambiguity, uncertainty. Wordplay is perhaps best understood as one of the tools that make possible poetry’s extraordinary concision. The King of Limericks is committed to the democratization of philosophy and spirituality, and to the idea that limericks can deliver something far more enriching than just dirty-minded double entendre. Prose has, the story reminds us, its own gorgeous and powerful concisions, but nothing to compare with the reach belonging to verse. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

False or awkward meter: Asimov was certainly educated enough to understand the correct meter of a limerick, and for the most part he gets them right. Still, poetry is a tricky enterprise, routinely upending generalizations that would contain or confine it. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore and Amherst, Massachusetts. Nor does he seem to use any alliteration or internal rhyming, devices that can add a little something extra to the limerick. International products have separate terms, are sold from abroad and may differ from local products, including fit, age ratings, and language of product, labeling or instructions.Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? It’s also to traffic in a language of ambivalence more emotionally authentic—truer to one’s own forever irreconcilably mixed outlook on life—than any simpler utterance. But this year they came up a little dry and given today is all about having a bit of a laugh we had to reach deep into the archives for something a little different.