Edward Lear

Send to table immediately.

This all seemed to Alice very much as though it might have come out of Mr. Edward Lear's book of nonsense cookery.

She made no remark, however, but on looking round at her audience she saw that they were much impressed.

Send to table immediately, repeated the March Hare.

Modern poets, they still build them on purpose, sometimes as a party trick, sometimes as something closer to a seance, just pulling a line from writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, and then setting them to each other inside the same poem.

One poet built a cento entirely out of other people's lines and gave it a title borrowed from Edward Lear on top of the borrowed words underneath it.

There's a line between a cento and a plagiarism, though, and it's not really a literary line.

It's closer to a legal and ethical one.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, he wanted to be Lewis Carroll mixed in with some of those other kind of, you know, the Goons and that, that was his thing, Edward Lear.

So yeah.

It's interesting what you say about source code 'cause I've always thought that Lewis Carroll represents dreamlike reality.

It is good for him to wonder... whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

the matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh abrupt and inventive in any age and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies that it was to be found in the rhymes of mr edward lear and in the literature of nonsense the dong with the luminous nose at least is original as the first ship and the first plough were original It is true, in a certain sense, that some of the greatest writers the world has seen, Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Stern, have written nonsense, but unless we are mistaken it is in a widely different sense.

The nonsense of these men was satiric, that is to say, symbolic.

It was a kind of exuberant capering around a discovered truth.

We fancy that if the account of the knave's trial in Alice in Wonderland had been published in the seventeenth century, it would have been bracketed with Bunyan's trial of the faithful as a parody on the state prosecutions of the time.

we fancy that if the dong with the luminous nose had appeared in the same period every one would have called it a dull satire on oliver cromwell it is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from mr lear's nonsense rhymes to our mind he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense we think him superior to lewis carroll in one sense indeed lewis carroll has the great advantage we know what lewis carroll was in daily life he was a singularly serious and conventional don universally respected but very much of a pendant and something of a philistine thus his strange double life in earth and in the dreamland emphasises the idea that lies at the back of nonsense the idea of escape of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness where apples grow on pear-trees and any odd man you meet may have three legs Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have sundered morally against any one who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was by his very divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense.

his wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians we feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade we feel that if we could pierce their disguises we might discover that humpty dumpty and the march hare were professors and doctors of divinity enjoying a mental holiday This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason.

We do not know his prosaic biography, as we know Lewis Carroll's.

Dr. Seuss gave us the all-too-common term nerd, cartoonist H.T. Webster gave us milk toast, and Louis Sarkar gave us sploosh.

Lewis Carroll was responsible for the fine descriptive words snark, portmanteau, galumph, and chortle, and Edward Lear gave us runcible.

The Gilbert and Sullivan musical The McAdoo coined the word poobah, but it was the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Flintstones that popularized grand poobah.

Chick Young's comic strip Blondie created the Dagwood, an impossibly huge sandwich, and E.C. Seeger's Thimble Theater, the predecessor of his Popeye cartoon, bequeathed to us the word goon.

writing the book? Well, I loved Southey's cat, Rumpelstiltskin, who was usually known just as Rumpel.

But I think probably the favorite cat when I wrote the book was Edward Lear's wonderful cat, who was originally named Adorphos, but he shortened the name to Phos, F-O-S-S.

And Edward Lear was, as well as a fine writer of limericks particularly, was a very fine artist.

He actually earned his major living from painting and from drawings.

And he did many fabulous illustrations of caricatures of of himself, he was rather rotund, and of Foss.

You can find out why in my book.

And Foss was rather portly and striped.

And Edward Lear does fabulous drawings.

Elsewhere we have nothing to compare with them, save such literary cattle as the Jabberwock, the Quangle-Wangle-Quee, and the Snark.

Still, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear did think along the same lines as Wallace Martin.

They dreamed similar dreams.

Only Wallace Martin has dreamt them in clay, and baptized them with flame.