Edward Lear: The Play of Poetry by eds. James Williams and Matthew Bevis (review)

What makes a poem a poem and not prose? There's no simple answer to this question, though countless poets and critics have tried to give one. But there are some generally-agreed distinctions. Poetry has something to do with received forms and rhythms, something to do with punctuation, something to do with the use of metaphor, and something to do with concentration of language. And something to do with nonsense. With the difference between constructions that "aspire to spell an exact proposition," in Seamus Heaney's phrase, and those that hoist up the hem of their clothes and run away over the horizon calling to us over their shoulder, "You can't catch me."

We can easily test this notion by thinking for a moment about the word "nonsense." In ordinary prose speech it means something like "rubbish" (as in: "you're talking nonsense"). But if you put the word "nonsense" next to the word "poetry," nobody thinks it means "rubbish." It means language that conveys its sense by unorthodox means––by an extravagant deployment of linguistic play, and by prioritizing fun. It means a different sort of association between sound and sense. It means Lewis Carroll and "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and it means Edward Lear, who pioneered this use of the word by calling his first collection of poems A Book of Nonsense when he published it in 1846.

As Lear made this bold step, he simultaneously aired a question about poetic identity. That's to say: He showed that writing nonsense poetry is among other things a way of saying something in disguise. Of dressing up "serious" thoughts in "comical" clothes, of crossing age boundaries (are the poems for adults or children?), and of smuggling complicated or even illegal secrets into view. Lear emphasised the point by publishing this first book under a pseudonym––"Old Derry down Derry."

This name (if "name" is quite the right term) was one of several pseudonyms that Lear adopted in his life and letters (another, "Adopty Duncle," makes light-heavy play with the word "Nuncle," that Shakespeare put in the mouth of his regal namesake King Lear). So who was he, and what drove him to this lifelong game of sociable self-concealment? The best way to start answering that question is by looking at "How pleasant to know Mr Lear," which he wrote near the end of his life––he died in 1888 aged 76. This poem is a self-portrait in which comedy is always at pains to absorb, counter-balance or conceal its opposite:

He weeps by the side of the ocean,      He weeps on the top of the hill;He purchases pancakes and lotion,      And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

As a way of explaining these tears, and in a similarly ambiguous tone, Lear tells us elsewhere in this poem that "His nose is remarkably big," that "His visage is more or less hideous," that "Long ago he was one of the singers/But now he is one of the dumms," that he is "perfectly spherical," and that children run after him calling him a "crazy old Englishman." Most of these are plausible reasons for self-dislike, but as we finish reading the poem we still find ourselves thinking they are hardly enough to explain the deep misery that is buried at its heart. The same good humour that assuages or controls unhappiness also alerts us to the possibility that something is being glossed over and withheld.

Vivien Noakes's excellent biography The Life of a Wanderer helped us to understand this "something" when its first version appeared in 1969. So did W. H. Auden's earlier and brilliant sonnet called simply "Edward Lear." Auden took a no-nonsense tone (and a phrase that Lear often used to describe himself), identifying him as "a dirty landscape painter who hated his nose," and suggesting that by dint of hard work and ingenious charm he...