Book of Nonsense

by Edward Lear

Overview

Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear. Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. He published four settings in 1853, five in 1859, and three in 1860. Lear's were the only musical settings that Tennyson approved of. Lear also composed music for many of his nonsense songs, including "The Owl and the Pussy-cat," but only two of the scores have survived, the music for "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo" and "The Pelican Chorus". While he never played professionally, he did perform his own nonsense songs and his settings of others' poetry at countless social gatherings, sometimes adding his own lyrics (as with the song "The Nervous Family"), and sometimes replacing serious lyrics with nursery rhymes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781721641123
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	06/20/2018
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	7.01(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.07(d)

About the Author

EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888), was a British writer and artist, who created landscape paintings, nonsense verse, and the illustration of birds and reptiles. He was Queen Victoria's private drawing master and given a place in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. As a naturalist painter, his work is often compared to the bird paintings of Gould and Audubon, who both worked with Lear. As a writer, Lear's humorous alphabets and wordplay influenced such twentieth-century writers as Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, and Laura Richards.

Table of Contents

A book of Nonsense, Publisher's Note, Nonsense poems.

Editorial Reviews

A magic song-writer, with something like a reverence for the absurd.

Time Literary Supplement

'I really don't know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.' - John Ruskin

'A magic song-writer, with something like a reverence for the absurd.' - Times Literary Supplement

'I really don't know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.' - John Ruskin

From the Publisher