The first set of poems is humorous and should ideally be read in the manner of Stanley Holloway when he performed The Lion and Albert—in other words with a Lancshire or Yorkshire accent. I guess mine is a mix of the two, having been brought up on the Fylde Coast, educated in York and worked in Bradford.
The Academy v Lyceum Marathon 330 BC and An Academic Outing imagine some philosophers being concerned with the usual kinds of matters that we would expect in academic institutions. These include the issue of where to go for the annual outing, and the problem of competition with rival institutions.
A Philosophical Lunch is rather a sad tale of a lunch being organised by Jeremy Bentham to honour the memory of Bishop George Berkely. Unfortunately, but for sound reasons, other philosophers and thinkers are not able to accept their invitations
Domesticity was also presumably part of philosophers' lives, although we don’t know whether Heraclitus was accompanied by a wife and children when he visited the river he famously maintained could not be stepped in twice.
The Enlightenment Philosophers’ Seven-a-side Football Team imagines these intellectual heavyweights having difficulties agreeing with each other about the nature of reality even though they share commitment to reason as the main method of establishing it.
The Limerick about Friedrich Nietzsche is rather naughty as the woman he proposed to three times kept turning him down.
In Epicurus and Zeno at the Market, we find these two famous leaders of rival schools in Ancient Athens advising a market trader when he finds that his business is threatened with competition.
Jean Paul Sartre goes to the Fair sees him shirk his duties when Simone de Beauvoir persuades him to go with her to the fair. It is an unlikely place for him to be inspired with titles for his existential philosophy, novels and plays, but this turns out to be the case.
These and thirteen further poems about philosophers in this style appear in the book, Eh-Up! Rhyme and Reason: An Alternative Guide to the History of Western Philosophy with accompanying introductions to the philosophers and their work by Gerald Rochelle.
The Academy v Lyceum Marathon 330 BC
A Day by the Stream with Heraclitus
The Enlightened Philosophers’ Seven-a-side Football Team
A Limerick about Friedrich Nietzsche
Epicurus and Zeno at the Market
Jean Paul Sartre goes to the Fair
The second set of poems is more serious: love poems written in February and March 2019