Afterword: Lear Outside Time

For Lear’s contemporaries, he was the writer of “beneficent and innocent” nonsense whom Ruskin (not given to laughter) placed top of his list of “Best 100 authors” in 1866.¹ For a later generation, T. S. Eliot admired his verbal acrobatics but also his musical gift and intensity of feeling: “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bò” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” wrote Eliot, “are poems of unrequited passion—‘blues’ in fact. We enjoy the music, which is of a high order, and we enjoy the feeling or irresponsibility towards the sense.”² W. H. Auden, who felt the melancholy beneath the wit, cherished Lear’s irresponsibility in a broader sense, seeing him as the defender of the odd, the marginal—the artist—against “The legions of cruel and inquisitive They,” so solid and strong, “like dogs” (Lear disliked dogs hugely).³ George Orwell saw him as a defender of willful individualism against “the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing.”⁴ In Lear, as Philip Larkin recognized, “the silliness was part of the seriousness.”⁵ His quirky irony appeals to modern readers, as does his mix of wariness and lavishness. Writing to Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell felt that Lear would “have enjoyed your feeling, your disciplined gorgeousness, your drawing, your sadness, your amusement.”⁶

The words of earlier critics and poets hover behind today’s readings: we each react to judgments, pick up some threads, and discard others. The essays published here, and in Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, as well as the books by Matthew Bevis, Sara Lodge, and James Williams published in 2018–2019 and forthcoming from Jasmine Jagger,⁷ all ripple with overlaps and subtle returns, illuminating Lear’s diversity and melancholy-comic spirit in rewarding new ways. It is good to read Lear in this company, returning to the work afresh. And the angle of reading has widened. Earlier criticism separated his multiple selves: the poet stood apart from the naturalist, natural history painter, landscape artist, and travel writer. Yet Lear’s diversity is celebrated here in James Williams’s polychromatic Lear—the “pertinacious peacock,” whose colors spill from landscapes to diaries, poems to letters—while Lear the musician, acutely sensitive to “the emotional dynamics of sound and silence,” is acknowledged in Sara Lodge’s essay. Even in the lightest works, like the “Nonsense Botany,” Lear’s different talents flow together. And always his work is governed by a riddling sense of time.

In Lear’s “Tickia Orologica” (see fig. 1; CN, p. 385), all the flowers tell different times, and some at the top have already shrunk into seed pods ready to burst and disperse: “If you are a dandelion clock, you can cast temporal accuracy to the wind—freedom from time is one of the pleasures of nonsense.”⁸ Lear wrote in his time, as we read in our time; but we can jump between the two, from the Dickensian “exhibitionism” of Lear discussed by Eliza Haughton-Shaw—rejoicing “in energetic gestures, postures, dances; in spectacular doings and undoings of decorum; in physical performances that take place in the interplay between word and image”—to the way that Paul Muldoon’s poetry finds itself, notes Alex Alonso, “dallying at the fringes of Lear’s nonsense, attracted not only to its playful perversities, its rhyme and unreason, but to the technical virtuosity of its ordering patterns, procedures, and conventions.” When Noreen Masud moves from Lear’s comic cookery to his deep sense of “impassable remnants,” this is a pointer not only to the way that he writes and feels but to the way we read and respond. Lear’s poetics, Masud writes, “revolve around a bustling using up of leftovers—but in doing so, they frame more acutely the astonishment of finding something still, starkly, remaining.”

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This time-traveling in reading, and the fact that I am writing an afterword make me puzzle about Lear and time, public, private, and poetic. Beyond objective time, the cycle of sun and moon, the turning Earth...