''Silly Verse for Kids'' is a collection of humorous poems,

limerick Limerick ( ; ga, Luimneach ) is a western city in Ireland situated within County Limerick. It is in the province of Munster and is located in the Mid-West which comprises part of the Southern Region. With a population of 94,192 at the 2016 ...

s and drawings for children by

Spike Milligan Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was an Irish actor, comedian, writer, musician, poet, and playwright. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Raj, British Colonial India, where h ...

, first published by

Dennis Dobson Dennis Dobson (1919 – 1978)Lewis Foreman, Susan Foreman''London: A Musical Gazetteer'' Yale University Press, 2005, p. 327. was a British book publisher who was the eponymous founder of a small but respected company in London. Background Set up ...

in 1959. ''Silly Verse for Kids'' was Milligan's first book. Many of the pieces had been written to entertain his children, who inspired some of the poems. Their lengths vary: some are as short as four lines, and very few extend to more than one page. Most are accompanied by one or more of Milligan's drawings, a few of which do not relate to the poems. The collection includes "

On the Ning Nang Nong "On the Ning Nang Nong" is a poem by the comedian Spike Milligan featured in his 1959 book '' Silly Verse For Kids''. 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 Car ...

". Later editions combine the original content of ''Silly Verse for Kids'' with two of Milligan's later collections: ''A Dustbin of Milligan'' and ''The Little Pot Boiler'', which had been published in 1961 and 1963 respectively.

References

English poetry collections British children's books Works by Spike Milligan 1959 books 1959 poems {{poetry-collection-stub