Both these poems were published in 1964 in Lennon's first volume of poetry, prose and drawings In His Own Write which met with huge critical and commercial success. The idea for the book had been that of his publisher's, Jonathan Cape, but Lennon had been writing his famous word-play since his schooldays and was thrilled with the success of his first book. He described how he devised his own idiosyncratic style of humour as a disguise: I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook..When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi. And when I was about fourteen they gave us this book in English literature - Chaucer and we all thought it was a gas. Whenever the teacher got that book out we would all collapse. After that I used to write something on the same lines myself. Just private stuff for myself and my friends to laugh at.. Other influences Lennon cited were Lewis Carroll, James Thurber and illustrator Ronald Searle. Lennon also described In His Own Write as being about nothing. If you like it, you like it; if you don't, you don't. There's nothing deep in it, it's just meant to be funny