Tag Archives: poems

A Hierarchy of Nonsense, By John Kropf

[I receive from John Kropf, and publish.] For a couple of semesters in college I worked at the on-campus student coffee house, The Bandersnatch, named after the creature in Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsensical poem, Jabberwocky. When you work inside a … Continue reading

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Wallace Stevens’s “playful, eroticized elaboration of Edward Lear”

Floral Decorations for Bananas by Wallace Stevens Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do. These insolent, linear peels And sullen, hurricane shapes Won’t do with your eglantine. They require something serpentine. Blunt yellow in such a room! You should have had … Continue reading

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Aubrey Beardsley’s Limerick on Illustrating Le Morte Darthur

This manuscript records memories of Aubrey Beardsley’s mother about amateur theatricals put on at home by the adolescent Aubrey and his sister, Mabel, and her  son’s reluctance to fulfil his commission to illustrate an edition of Le Morte Darthur (1893–1894). … Continue reading

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Peter Newell, Needledee and Needledum

When I published the other page with the same title I thought it was a one-shot, but it seems there was another, previous instalment in the March 1914 issue of The Ladies’ World. I do not own this so the scan … Continue reading

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Variant Versions of Edward Lear’s Limericks

‘There was an old person of Skye,/ Who was nearly a hundred feet high;/ He seemed to the people/ As tall as a steeple,/ And served as a lighthouse on Skye.’ (upper left) pen and brown ink, partial watermark ’18…’ … Continue reading

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Lydia Karpinska, The owl and the Pussy-cat Dancing

Lydia Karpinska, The Owl and the Pussy-cat. Capturing joy and movement from every angle, this charming intrepretation entitled They danced by the light of the moon, is of course the unmistakable owl and pussy cat of Edward Lear. This piece … Continue reading

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Three New Pieces of Nonsense by Edward Lear

The latest TLS (no. 6169 of 25 June 2021) contains three new Nonsense compositions by Edward Lear, found by Amy Wilcockson and Edmund Downey among the papers in the Charnwood Autograph Collection, British Library Add MS 70949, f. 239, f. … Continue reading

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Edward Lear and the Dolnik

From: Derek Attridge. “Rhythm: Children’s Poetry and the Dolnik“. In The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry. Ed. Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy. Routledge, 2017. In what follows, I hope to show by means of a few examples both the ubiquity and … Continue reading

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Meeting Edward Lear in Heaven

She wears a retro dress, the waist nipped small now that the tumors don’t bulge, a skirt that swirls, and dangling red earrings. Time’s different there and just this second she’s spotted the tall man excusing himself from Auden and … Continue reading

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Concert of Edward Lear’s Words and Music

The Words and Music of Edward Lear David Owen Norris, Piano and Mark Wilde, Tenor The Edinburgh Society of Musicians, 3 Belford Road Saturday 9th March at 3:15pm We are all familiar with Edward Lear’s nonsense poems but he was also … Continue reading

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