PublishedFaber & Faber, October 2017 |
ISBN9780571269549 |
FormatHardcover, 608 pages |
Dimensions24cm × 16cm × 4.5cm |
Edward Lear's poems follow and break the rules. They abide by the logic of syntax, the linking of rhyme and the dance of rhythm, and these 'nonsenses' are full of joy - yet set against darkness. Where do these human-like animals and birds and these odd adventures - some gentle, some violent, some musical, some wild - come from?
His many drawings that accompany his verse are almost hyper-real, as if he wants to free the creatures from the page. They exist nowhere else in literature, springing only from Lear's imagination.
Lear lived all his life on the borders of rules and structures, of disciplines and desires. He vowed to ignore politics yet trembled with passionate sympathies. He depended on patrons and moved in establishment circles, yet he never belonged among them and mocked imperial attitudes. He loved men yet dreamed of marriage - but remained, it seems, celibate, wrapped in himself. Even in his family he was marginal, at once accepted and rejected. Surrounded by friends, he was alone.
If we follow him across land and sea - to Italy, Greece and Albania, to The Levant and Egypt and India - and to the borderlands of spirit and self, art and desire, can we see, in the end, if the nonsense makes sense? This is what Jenny Uglow has set sail to find out.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
Edward Lear is known to us all for his nonsense poems, his brilliant natural history paintings, his landscapes and his travel writing. He belongs solidly in the age of Darwin and Dickens - he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and he counted Tennyson as one of his many friends. But his genius for the absurd and his dazzling word play make him a very modern spirit. This beautifully illustrated biography brings Edward Lear to life for us – a uniquely gifted man who lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires.
