Tag Archives: Edward Lear

Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Edward Lear

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

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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The Wisdom of Nonsense

WELL-TIMED nonsense is the divinest sense. In the current number of the Cornhill Magazine Canon Selwyn publishes some of the later letters of Edward Lear, and suggests that as the realm of sense is infinite, and as the realm of nonsense … Continue reading

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Later Letters of Edward Lear (to Canon Selwyn)

‘I DARE say you know my name: I once brought out the “Book of Nonsense,”‘ said the elderly gentleman wearing an eye-shade, as he sat under a shaded lamp in his solitary corner of the salle-à-manger of Dr. Pasta’s Hotel … Continue reading

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Mind Your Language

Many people think a runcible spoon is a sort of pickle-fork with a serrated edge. If that is what they call it, then that is the word for it, but it is not the same word that Edward Lear used … Continue reading

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Margaret Terry Meets Edward Lear

The summer of 1870 we spent in the mountains south of Turin. … That summer was memorable to me for my first experience in hero worship. Those were the days of the table d’hôte. The guest assembled and sat together … Continue reading

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Katharine West, Nonsense and Wit (1946)

SHOULD the British Council or arty other body concerned with the “projection of Britain” endeavour to make known abroad the unique British heritage of nonsense? Every country has its nursery rhymes and fairy tales; but, as M. Emile Cammaerts writes … Continue reading

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A Few Links

I have been checking and fixing a few links in the bibliography pages and added a new, interesting article to the Studies on Edward Lear page: Antinucci, Raffaella. “‘Sensational Nonsense.’ Edward Lear and the (Im)purity of Nonsense Writing.” English Literature … Continue reading

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John Mole, The Edward Lear Poem (1989)

John Mole, “The Edward Lear Poem.” The Spectator, 2 December 1989, p. 42. He kept his wife in a box he did And she never complained though the neighbours did Because of the size of the box and the way … Continue reading

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John Fuller, Edward Lear in Corsica

John Fuller, “Edward Lear in Corsica.” Times Literary Supplement, 7 July 1995. New Selected Poems: 1983-2008. London, Chatto & Windus, 2012. Is it not unpleasant, at fifty-six years of age, to feel that it is increasingly probablu that a man … Continue reading

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