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Literary nonsense, as recognized since the nineteenth century, comes from a combination of two broad artistic sources. The first and older source is the oral folk tradition, including games, songs, dramas, and rhymes, such as the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle". [3]
On the Ning Nang Nong" is a poem by the comedian Spike Milligan featured in his 1959 book Silly Verse for Kids. [1] In 1998 it was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poems by poets such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear .
Lear wrote the poem for a three-year-old girl, Janet Symonds, the daughter of Lear's friend and fellow poet John Addington Symonds and his wife Catherine Symonds. The term "runcible", used for the phrase "runcible spoon", was invented for the poem. It is believed that the cat in the poem was based on Lear's own pet cat, Foss. [2]
Some poets chose to write poems specifically for children, often to teach moral lessons. Many poems from that era, like "Toiling Farmers", are still taught to children today. [3] In Europe, written poetry was uncommon before the invention of the printing press. [4] Most children's poetry was still passed down through the oral tradition.
Other nonsense verse makes use of nonsense words—words without a clear meaning or any meaning at all. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear both made good use of this type of nonsense in some of their verse. These poems are well formed in terms of grammar and syntax, and each nonsense word is of a clear part of speech.
As much as we may want—or need—to write a love poem, it’s often difficult to find a language that adequately expresses the way we feel. For one thing, it’s hard to strike the right tone.
Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem written by English poet Lewis Carroll in 1871 and first published in his 1872 novel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The poem, about a boy and his encounter with a creature called the Jabberwock, was originally written backwards, and Alice used a looking glass to decode it.
It is often now cited as one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English, [3] [2] the source for countless parodies and tributes. In most cases the writers have changed the nonsense words into words relating to the parodied subject, as in Frank Jacobs 's "If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties" in Mad for Better or ...