Chapter 2 focuses on nonsense in poetry for children, its rhetorical means, and its ideological effects. The likening of dissimilars which Aristotle considered essential to the art of poetry is shown by Horace in his Ars Poetica, to present a clear danger of excess: poetry can result in the creation of monstrous hybrids. The art of the absurd nexus is characteristic of poetry, in the category of ‘nonsense’, as intended for children, from Edward Lear, through to Dr Seuss and beyond. Don Marquis’ early twentieth century text Archy and Mehitabel (1927), and subsequent books in the series (1933, 1935), subvert various stereotypical assumptions about both animal behaviour and its accessibility to fairytale motives. One could see the kind of challenge in Marquis’ Archy as forerunner for much more recent texts, drawing attention to ontological dimensions of human–animal relations, such as Dr. Seuss’ variously indeterminate anthropomorphised animal characters, or in Shaun Tan’s postmodern picture book, The Lost Thing (2000/2011). The poems with which this chapter deals originate in doubts of an ontological and epistemological kind, as expressed by Denise Levertov in ‘The Cat as Cat’ (1962).