I have to admit I was going slightly bonkers after reading this but it was highly entertaining nonetheless. I loved Lear’s tendency to play with the juxtaposition of using strange, out-of-place, and made-up words alongside such formal, rigid poetic structure.

It's a classic, and it's brilliant

I read The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear over the course of roughly six months. On most mornings I read just two pages. I think this is a good way to read Edward Lear -- if you read it all at once, you would quickly surfeit on it. But at two pages a day it remain

I love the poem where he introduces himself! From memory:How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
Who has written such masses of stuff
Some think him ill-tempered and queer
But a few find him pleasant enough.

He sits in a beautiful parlour
With hundreds of books on the wall
He drinks quite a lot of Marsala
But never

There was a young reader from Pittsburgh
Who read this weird book full of quirk
It got old so fast, she wanted to blast
That silly young reader from Pittsburgh

I cannot stress enough how horrible the limericks are. They often have extra syllables that mess up the rhythm, and often rhyme only because they repeat words. However, they, like all the other poems and stories, are accompanied by the authors own entertaining sketches, so I can almost forgive them.

Throughout my idea of Lear was a Children's Limerick writer! From what I had read about his life, that made sense. He wrote those five-lines rhyming poems for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby. After reading this compilation, that view of mine changed considerably! Th