THE LURE OF THE LIMERICK by William S. Baring-Gould. 246 pages. Potter. $5.
"Scorn not the sonnet," wrote William Wordsworth, who had composed hundreds of those 14-line verses, some memorable, but most of them, notably his 47 sonnets on the ecclesiastical history of England, long forgotten.
Many people despise the limerick, an equally strict art form, but it survives because it is easily remembered. Until recently, limericks were mostly unprintable and constituted one of the few forms of modern oral literature.
The late William S. Baring-Gould, a descendant of the author of Onward...
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