A quick look online will give you a curious list of writing that was banned at some time. Obscenity is the common reason for censorship, but you wouldn’t think that Shakespeare is included in that category. The Bowdlers took it upon themselves to remove passages from the bard’s work that they considered obscene.
Ovid was banished for his poetry which offended Caesar Augustus. In 1497 a Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola, included Ovid’s works in a bonfire of objects he found immoral that became known as the Bonfire of the Vanities.
Nonsense poetry in children’s verse has not escaped the censor’s vigilance. Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic was challenged by two Elementary schools in Wisconsin stating that other poems “glorified Satan, suicide, and cannibalism, and also encouraged children to be disobedient.”
Lewis Carroll’s anthropomorphism was deemed offensive in China’s Hunan province by General Ho Chien. Talking animals like the Cheshire cat were the guilty parties.
Political writing is the obvious target for censorship. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgenyev Zamyatin, Federico Garcia Lorca, Yan Lianke have all been critical of their countries’ governments in print.
Enlightenment writers in 18th century France had a hard time getting printed because the king sent his soldiers to smash the presses of publishers who offended him. Despite that risk, Denis Diderot managed to put out a famous work the Encyclopaedie that used irony to poke fun at monarchy and religion.
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