Poem hunter edward lear biography

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Due to the family’s failing financial fortune, at age four he and his sister had to leave the family home and set up house together.

Lear suffered from health problems. His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour.

Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously. For example, “Cold Are The Crabs”, adheres to the sonnet tradition until the dramatically foreshortened last line.

Limericks are invariably typeset as four plus one lines today, but Lear’s limericks were published in a variety of formats.

Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. During the years 1831–1837 that Lear was at Knowsley, his relationship with Edward Stanley became increasingly less formal. He established a home in San Remo, Italy, where he spent his final days before passing away on January 30, 1888.

Nonsensical Contributions

Lear's most significant contribution to poetry lies in his limericks and numerous well-known poems, including "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," "The Jumblies," and "The Dong with the Luminous Nose." During his life, four volumes of his nonsense writings were published:

Book of Nonsense (1846)

Laughable Lyrics, A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, etc. (1877)

In 1912, The Complete Nonsense Book was released, providing the first comprehensive collection of Lear's nonsense.

Supporters of this rumour offered as evidence the facts that both men were named Edward, and that “Lear” is an anagram of “Earl”.

Lear’s Limericks

Lear’s nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet’s delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary.

It appears that Lear wrote them in manuscript in as many lines as there was room for beneath the picture. An example of a typical Lear limerick:

There was an Old Man of Aôsta,
Who possessed a large Cow, but he lost her;
But they said, ‘Don’t you see,
she has rushed up a tree?
You invidious Old Man of Aôsta’

Lear’s self-portrait in verse, How Pleasant to know Mr.

Lear, closes with this stanza, a reference to his own mortality:

He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear

Five of Lear’s limericks from the Book of Nonsense, in the 1946 Italian translation by Carlo Izzo, were set to music for choir a cappella by Goffredo Petrassi, in 1952.

Edward Lear’s Works:

Mount Timohorit, Albania (1848)
Illustrations of the Family of the Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832)
Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles by J.E.

Gray
Views in Rome and its Environs (1841)
Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley Hall (1846)
Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846)
Book of Nonsense (1846)
Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania (1851)
Journal of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria (1852)
Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense (1862)
Views in the Seven Ionian Isles (1863)
Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)
Nonsense Songs and Stories (1871)
More Nonsense Songs, Pictures, etc.

Over this period, in addition to drawing and painting, Lear entertained the children of the Stanley family. Also later, after the death of the 13th Earl, as Lear travelled through southern Europe and further afield, the 14th and 15th Earls of Derby continued to buy Lear’s work.

Lear travelled for three years in Italy from 1837 and published two volumes of illustrations, Illustrated Excursions in Italy, the first of many such books.

After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888, of the heart disease from which he had suffered since at least 1870. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and in later life, partial blindness. For companions he relied instead on a circle of friends and correspondents, and especially, in later life, on his Albanian Suliot chef, Giorgis, a faithful friend and, as Lear complained, a thoroughly unsatisfactory chef.

In fact, he dedicated his first collection of rhymes, published as A Book of Nonsense in 1846, to the 13th Earl’s great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces.

In 1837, Lear left Knowsley for Rome, a move which was fully supported by Edward Stanley, now 13th Earl of Derby, as part of his personal and artistic development.

In the same year, the Earl of Derby invited him to reside at his estate; Lear ended up staying until 1836.

Lear’s first book of poems, A Book of Nonsense (Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1846) was composed for the grandchildren of the Derby household. In Lear’s time epilepsy was believed to be associated with demonic possession, which contributed to his feelings of guilt and loneliness.

Rather, Lear is remembered for his humorous poems, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and as the creator of the form and meter of the modern limerick. When Lear was about seven he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the constant instability of his childhood. Despite his posthumous fame as a poet, painting was his primary occupation during his lifetime.

Artistic Journeys

Lear embarked on extensive travels, particularly around the Mediterranean region.