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| Edward Lear |
How pleasant to know Mr Lear is getting a rousing bicentenary. He’d have been an absurd 200 last Saturday, and the event was augustly marked at the British Library and Westminster Abbey, on the BBC, and in fact all over the place from Venice to Corfu – see nonsenselit.wordpress.com for an impressive list of events this month and throughout 2012. There’s to be a good many talks as well as exhibitions and a conference in Oxford in September.
Plenty of solemn tosh has indeed been written about nonsense writing, some of it Gallically hyping up the revolutionary and Freudian possibilities, but the appeal of the genre is reduced if we squeamishly refuse to allow that interesting imaginative thought is involved. The word 'nonsense' is partly to blame; it misleadingly implies that nonsense writing is a negation of sense, whereas its secret lies in its mix of sensical and nonsensical elements. The Owl and the Pussy-cat may be impossible spouses, but they sensibly go through the approved marital proceedings. Just as the mock-epic doesn’t only mock epic, so the nonsensical doesn’t only mock sense; and nonsense writing is the mock-epic of the Victorian era (think of The Hunting of the Snark or even 'The Jumblies').
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| Peter Swaab |
'Lear never married, and lived most of his unsettled life as a travelling landscape painter. Was he gay? Probably. The biographical evidence is not conclusive, but it points that way. Does it matter? It needn’t, if we prefer it not to; the poems can be well enough enjoyed without any darker intimations, especially by younger readers. But good writing for children usually has a further dimension for adults, and the experience of unrequited love in Lear’s own life suggests a shape for his stories and a context for the outsiderliness which fired his imagination. His nonsense world is full of allegories of frustrated and sometimes rapturous love.'
Edward Lear
'My heart sank when I read the question "Was he gay?"', somebody wrote. But the best nonsense writers (Lear, Carroll, Housman) were deviants from what their contemporaries would have thought sense in sexual matters, and some of their poetic admirers too (Auden and Bishop, notably). One far-reaching ground for nonsense writing is the idea that the heart’s desire is absurd when it’s at home, but magical too and imaginable in a poetic world of elsewhere.
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by Edward Lear
Edited with an introduction by Peter Swaab
Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun.
This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.
