Raymond Queneau's work is difficult to classify. Set to music by the Frères Jacques, his Exercices de style (1947; translated as Exercises in Style, 1958) earned him a reputation as something of a comedian. That reputation was confirmed by the appearance of the highly popular, highly zany Zazie dans le métro (Zazie on the Subway, 1959; translated as Zazie, 1960), for which Queneau won the Prix de l'Humour Noir (Black Humor Prize). Although less well known, his substantial œuvre in verse shows that if Queneau is habitually jocose, his antics are meant in deadly earnest. Combining metaphysical high jinks with mathematical, linguistic, and stylistic experimentation, ignorance with learning, high with low, tradition with invention, Queneau's wit belongs to the baroque tradition of serio ludere (comic seriousness) descending from Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) to Alfred Jarry. Though Queneau's poetry typically takes on the lineaments...