About Edward Lear
Edward Lear was a British writer, illustrator, and ornithologist, born on May 12, 1812, in Holloway (a suburb of London in the United Kingdom), and died on January 29, 1888, in San Remo (Kingdom of Italy). He is best known for his poetry and limericks work “A Book of Nonsense and Nonsense Songs”, “Stories”, “Botany and Alphabets” which included his most famous nonsense song and poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat”.His father's financial troubles nevertheless forced him to earn his own living at a very young age. He specialized early on, influenced by his sister Ann, as a bird painter, eventually discovering his vocation for landscape painting, which led him to travel extensively. He became the assistant of a naturalist and learned to draw birds, which soon earned him the esteem of the president of the Zoological Society of London, Lord Derby, whose protégé he became.
Lear is known in the literary world for his Nonsense Poems (1871), with which he brought the limerick genre to its highest expression. He never wanted to admit that these comic verses could have a hidden meaning. In most of Lear's limericks the first and last lines usually end with the same word rather than rhyming.
In 1830, he began earning his living as an illustrator for a book entitled Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots. The quality of his illustrations made such a great impression that he continued to draw and paint throughout his life, even though his dearest dream, illustrating the poems of Alfred Tennyson, would never be realized.
In 1846, he published “A Book of Nonsense”, a collection of limericks that went through three successive editions and helped popularize the limerick, a poetic genre already deeply rooted in British folk tradition. Limericks, similar to rhyming couplets ending with a short, absurd moral, also borrowed from nursery rhymes, somewhere between lullabies and children's songs.
In 1865, “The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple” was published, and in 1867, his most famous collection of nonsense poetry, “The Owl and the Pussycat”, appeared, written for the children of his patron, Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby.
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