XII Connection of Poetry and Humour
It was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the same process that makes poetry and poets—the reconciliation of incongruities.
When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two things:—
| I. | That Absalom thought he could dance well. |
| II. | That the professors of the University of Oxford are hardly the people from whom one would expect the most likely instruction in that art, |
and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion. Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off disappointingly.