Why is the verse of Dr Seuss so difficult for anyone else to do well?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve seen quite a few examples of verse written in an attempt to mimic the style of Dr Seuss - from amateurs, a lot and it’s nearly always cringe, but even in produced works where presumably there were professionals tasked with writing, nobody seems to be able to do it very well.

For example in The Grinch (2000), there is a fair bit of original verse included in the narration, but there are also parts where they had to fill in and write additional narrative (partly because things in the movie aren’t in the book). The boundaries between original and additional material are sharply apparent - and I think not just because I know the source material very well - the additional material is just awkward and forced; the original stuff has an (apparently) inimitable flow.

Of course, it’s evidence of Geisel’s skill and talent, but it still seems weird. I initially felt like the tetrameter of (the majority of) Dr Seuss verse ought to make the writing job simpler, but is that the factor that actually makes it more difficult?

Of course some of the mimics aren’t even trying - for example there is a McDonalds ad in circulation, promoting Grinch-themed menu items and it’s employs some sort of verse that seems like it wants to evoke the style of Dr Seuss, but it’s completely broken in both rhyme and metre.

2

I think it employs the same use of language as a good rap lyric, where the rhythm and rhyme are not just in the end words, but through the entire sentence. Also it’s intended for children to be able to read easily, with simple vocabulary.

If you only concentrate on rhyme and story, but don’t work on rhythm and vocabulary, you will come up short.

3

Robert Browning managed it, but he was a master craftsman:

4

You just got to read a lot of his stuff:

5

The New York City Subway once ran a Grinch-themed “courtesy campaign” ad written in faux-Seuss verse, ending with the lines:

When the doors open up, let the passengers through -

Listen, if I can be civilized, so can you!

I still wonder how no one thought to replace “Listen” with “Look,” or “Hey,” or anything else that didn’t completely throw off the scansion.

6

Hey, if i can be civilized, you can be, too

7

I like it :+1:

8

I think people miss how technical his rhythm actually is. It feels playful on the surface, yet every line hits a very tight pattern. When you try to copy it without that control, the verse slips into something clunky or sing songy. Dr Seuss also used simple words in a very precise order. That mix is hard to recreate, so most attempts end up sounding off even if the rhyme is correct.

9

I think maybe part of the skill is to be able to think in parallel lines - The verse has to mean what it is intended to mean. It has to fit the metre and rhythm. It has to rhyme (which itself is a subprocess of parallel thinking in itself - you have to be simultaneously considering and working on both Thing One AND Thing Two)

10

I think this is the essence of it. “Poetry is the best words in the best order”. To write a good poem you not only have to choose the right word to express what you mean to say in the way you mean to say it, you also have to choose the right word to fit your metre and rhyme scheme. Even for gifted poets, this means a lot of going back and revising and even restructuring whole verses so that each word can pull double duty.

The good news is that humans have been composing poetry for longer than they’ve been doing almost anything else, and when people spend a long time doing difficult things they develop lots of techniques to do it. Techniques that anyone can learn - if they put in the time and effort. Geisel broke off his Oxford D Phil in English Literature but he clearly had the training in poetic techniques. There’s a good discussion here of the different metres he employed, and the rigour with which he stuck to them:

Some books by Geisel that are written mainly in anapestic tetrameter also contain many lines written in amphibrachic tetrameter, such as these from If I Ran the Circus:

"All ready to put up the tents for my circus.
I think I will call it the Circus McGurkus.
“And NOW comes an act of Enormous Enormance!
No former performer’s performed this performance!”

Geisel also wrote verse in trochaic tetrameter, an arrangement of a strong beat followed by a weak beat, with four units per line (for example, the title of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish). The formula for trochaic meter permits the final weak position in the line to be omitted, which facilitates the construction of rhymes.

Geisel generally maintained trochaic meter only for brief passages, and for longer stretches typically mixed it with iambic tetrameter, which consists of a weak beat followed by a strong, and is generally considered easier to write. Thus, for example, the magicians in Bartholomew and the Oobleck make their first appearance chanting in trochees (thus resembling the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth):
“Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff”
then switch to iambs for the oobleck spell:
“Go make the Oobleck tumble down
On every street, in every town!”

I think a big part of the answer as to why the rest of us find this difficult is that we haven’t spent any time doing disciplined study of and thinking about trochees, iambs, stresses, beats, etc. and without that technical grounding we’re at a major disadvantage.

ETA - another disadvantage of people not having that formal training in poetics is that when a company hires an ad agency to write an advert in teh form a poem, many people have to approve it and none of them can spot the error. I mean, you’d think they would, but that “Listen, if I can be civilised…” line was signed off by a lot of people and… none of them could count beats and stresses, apparently.

11

I’m going to use this as an excuse to link to @Borborygmi’s effort from the famous “prehensile rectum” thread:

12

That’s the thing I notice the most. Even if a word would feel fine in a “normal” song or poem, it might not be exactingly enough of a fit for the standards of Dr Seuss’s rhythm.

13

OTOH, the Simpsons writing staff pulled off a surprisingly competent Seuss pastiche for one of their “Treehouse of Horror” episodes:

14

That was the scene whenI knew I loved Moonlighting.

Of course, they enshittified it later…

15

Nothing lasts forever. We got 3 good seasons, which is more than enough.

16

I think season 5 was somewhat of a recovery, but yeah, three good seasons.

To the Dr. Seuss question, I think a big part of the answer is simply that 99.99 percent of all people who try to write poetry suck ass at producing anything that could be considered passable, never mind trying to imitate someone who was a world-class master. They either have no real feel for it, or they think it’s easy (in large part, probably, because the really good poets make it look effortless), or whatever. And that includes people who write pretty good prose.

That’s not to say I think that anyone who wants to write poetry should stifle the urge. I’m just saying that doesn’t mean I want to read it.

17

I think this is exactly right.

I’ll add that those attempting to mimic his style can’t help but wink at the reader to say “I’m imitating Dr. Seuss, isn’t that funny and clever!?” The overwhelming need to include this self-referential commentary (which often comes in the form of excessive direct quoting of Seuss, using Seuss’ existing lines as a kind of Mad Libs with nouns replaced, or by using profane or “adult” language as shocking contrast to what one expects if one is reading Seuss himself) weakens the writing.