The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense

Well, he's not PC, but some of the poems are quite funny.

Among Mr. Lear's characters, I really do most sincerely appreciate Violet, Lionel, Guy, and Slingsby.

Oh this book! This book holds great sentimental value to me because my family has been reading it for four generations. I read it to Logan, my dad read it to my siblings and I, my grandfather read it to my dad, and my great-grandfather dad read it to my grandfather. The pure silliness is just fabulous! It is especially great considering that children's literature was not a big genera like it is today. I would have loved to meet Leer because he is so crazy and imaginative. I can only imagine what a talk with him would be like!

so far it is lovely. i especially enjoy his nonsense botany doodles and other artwork included!

Lear's compendium of small jokes and assorted nonsense is delightfully funny, and anticipated the comedy of countless generations that depend on the ridiculous. He sums up this philosophy in a quote to be found in the wonderfully written introduction to this volume: 'Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils', he wrote. It is a philosophy as much as a genre. For him it was a response to 'this ludicrously whirligig life which one suffers from first & laughs at afterwards'. Lear himself was not blessed with an easy life, and his comedy offered him a way out. Such limerick's as the following that I could not help but linking with the current state of the UN prove the point: There was an Old Man of the Hague, Whose ideas were excessively vague; He built a balloon, to examine the moon, That deluded Old Man of the Hague. However, underneath the nonsense there is a great poet. Verses such as the following from the "Growling Eclogue" offer wonderful imagery: Last week I called aloud, O! O! O! O! The ground is wholly overspread with snow! Is that at any rate a theme for mirth Which makes a sugar-cake of all the earth? His best, though, are his honest and heartfelt poems of disappointment. Among these, read 'When the light dies away on a calm summer's eve', 'The gloom that winter casts', and 'O dear! How disgusting is life!'. Their beauty can be found in such lines as the following from "Miss Maniac" - "And felt how doubly keen it is to mourn - and mourn alone!". This is a serious volume. It should be read for its mirth, as well as for the fantastic poet to be found hiding underneath the nonsense.