Category Archives: Nonsense Lyrics

Songs whose lyrics consist of invented words, or words that make no sense.

Calendaria Botanica Ridiculoso

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Marco Graziosi

Among the many merits of Sara Lodge’s Inventing Edward Lear is the identification of Marie Duval as the author of a previously unattributed book, Calendaria Botanica Ridiculoso (first edition 1877). More on Duval. Lodge writes (p. 212): Lear’s ideas gave rise in … Continue reading →

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Eliot’s The Naming of Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Marco Graziosi

T.S. Eliot, The Naming of Cats, illustrated by Edward Gorey. From The American Poetry Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (JULY/AUGUST 1982), p. 9.

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Pussycat Pussycat

Posted on November 10, 2018 by Marco Graziosi

“Pussycat pussycat, where have you been?” “I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen.” “Pussycat pussycat, what did you there?” “I frightened a little mouse under her chair” “MEOWW!” First published in London during 1805 in the book Songs … Continue reading →

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Summer Reading

Posted on August 24, 2018 by Marco Graziosi

The New York Times at last reviews Jenny Uglow’s Lear biography, Mr Lear: David Orr, There Once Was a Man Who Felt Lonely: A Biographer Considers Edward Lear’s Art and Its Sources. A few week ago Peter Byrne, a frequent commentator … Continue reading →

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Four Reviews of Children’s Books (1872)

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Marco Graziosi

Sing-Song: a Nursery-rhyme Book. By Christina G. Rossetti. With 120 Illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Routledge. The Princess and the Goblin. By George Macdonald. Strahan. Through the Looking-glass, and what Alice saw there. By the Author of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. … Continue reading →

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Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Edward Lear

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Marco Graziosi

It has always irked Paul that posterity regards him as the tuneful, cosy, safe side of the Lennon–McCartney partnership and John as the rebel, experimenter and iconoclast. The casting had been decided in Liverpool, then Hamburg, where he’d always hung … Continue reading →

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John Lennon, Edward Lear, and Nonsense

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Marco Graziosi

An English exercise book from his junior year at Quarry Bank—neatly covered in brown paper and titled MY ANTHOLOGY—demonstrates what pains he [John Lennon] would take if his enthusiasm were aroused. Quotations from classic poems like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha … Continue reading →

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Syd Barrett and Edward Lear

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Marco Graziosi

[Syd Barrett’s Fart Enjoy contains] two pages of cut-up nursery rhymes. One reads: Sprat Locket Patch Lift The Latch. Johnny Shall Have A New Bonnet The other reads: Hark! Jack Was Diddlty Dumpty All Jolly To Market To Buy A … Continue reading →

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John Ashbery, Tuesday Evening (1995)

Posted on December 5, 2015 by Marco Graziosi

In case after reading yesterday’s “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” you were wondering, like me, what “a long nonsense poem” by John Ashbery looked / sounded / felt like, here is Tuesday Evening She plundered the fun in his hair. … Continue reading →

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Carolyn Wells’s Lovely Lilly

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Marco Graziosi

Carolyn Wells often contributed to the children’s sections of newspapers in the first decade of the XX century. One of the weirdest of these contributions was no doubt Adventures of Lovely Lilly, which ran in the Sunday New York Herald from December 1906 … Continue reading →

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