Sometimes it's relaxing to read something into which absolutely nothing can be read - (How's that for a strange sentence?) - and Edward Lear certainly delivers on that front. You could try looking for an allegory or a moral lesson or just some symbolism in his nonsense, just like you could try looking for meaning in fractals or winning lotto numbers - it's beside the point, or even absolutely pointless. And that means that its awesome comes purely from the way it plays with language and images, which is always fun.

That said, apart from the big classics, the ones you probably know already - the Owl and the Pussy Cat, the Pobble Who Has No Toes, and the Quangle-Wangle - there isn't really too much here that you need to know about. They're pleasant, occasionally pretty funny, but that's about all. But they are still definitely good for a laugh or two.

Edward Lear's nonsense was a favourite read for John Lennon. He kept a copy in his bedroom at Menlove Avenue, and perhaps explains John's drawing style as well as the lyric writing of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
The laureate of nonsense is collected together with five publications; 'A Book of Nonsense' (1846), 'Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets' (1871), 'More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany,Etc.'(1872), 'Laughable Lyrics, A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, Etc.(1877) and 'Nonsense Songs and Stories' (1895).
'A Book of Nonsense' is a collection of limericks accompanied by Lear drawings. Perhaps these were a great source of hilarity and merriment in the parlours of Victorian Britain around the mid nineteenth century.
'Nonsense Songs', brings me as close as I'm going to get to appreciate Edward Lear. 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat', 'The Jumblies' , 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose' and 'The Pobble Who Has No Toes' are old friends.

Lessons Learned From Complete Nonsense:

Indulge in Some Nonsense - Not everything in life has to make sense. Reading works like Edward Lear's Complete Nonsense can be difficult for me. When I read anything--magazines, books, the nutrition facts on the back of my hazelnut Hershey bar--I automatically become a drilling rig, whose sole mission is to find pools of knowledge. I became frustrated while reading Lear's work. I felt lost. I could not extract meaning from what I was reading. I felt like the thirteen-year-old version of myself reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex for the first time. Halfway through the book, I realized that not being able to find meaning in words right in front of me no longer bothered me. Instead, I solely focused on visualizing the eerie characters and scenes that I stumbled upon while reading. By the end, I found my precious pool of knowledge. Here is what I learned: Exposing yourself to literature that at first does not make sense to you can be daunting, but, there is much to gain from this experience. Reading Lear's work helped me gained new perspectives, provided me with multiple bursts of creative thinking, and taught me that sometimes, the joy we take away from what we read is all we need.

Nonsense in the best possible way!

4/5 stars. The limericks are a touch disappointing, but I think this is more to do with the format of the times, where the final line is more or less a repetition of the first line, rather than the punchline that we have today. But there is a lot of innocent humor in all of these pages, including the illustrations. I wish there were more “true poems” like ‘The Jumblies’ and ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’.

Sin sentido???Pues para mí sí que tiene, y mucho!!hay que encontrarle el sentido al sin sentido...

Creo que es libro más original que me he leído nunca, mezclando poesía, narrativa, dibujos, abecedarios, canciones, recetas de cocina....increíble!!Leeré más de Edward Lear; dejaré que me sorprenda aún más!

This book includes a series of Nonsense from the author but i love most is the 'Nonsense Alphabets'. You will eventually find yourself read out loud all those poems and laugh a lot.

However, the rest of the book is a little boring to me, esp. 'A book of nonsense' even the illustrations seem funny and very interesting though.

"There was an Old Person of Cromer,
Who stood on one leg to read Homer,
When he found he grew stiff, he jumped over the cliff,
Which concluded that Person of Cromer."

Nonsensical? Yes. Delightful? Absolutely.

I suggest reading this in two installments. I read about 40% of it, including the very good Holbrook Jackson introduction, back in late Feb 2020, immediately following the birth of my daughter. Then I read the remaining 60% nearly a year to the day, on 2/16/2021, a day that saw me grappling with all the anxieties attendant to fatherhood, early middle age, and so on.

Suffice it to say, Lear is no Lewis Carroll or George MacDonald. But he wouldn't claim to be. What he was was your typical English eccentric "bachelor," in his case a working artist born of a fallen Highgate family, who churned out sketches and paintings and wrote nonsense verse on the side.

What's interesting here is the fusion of art and text, something few Victorian wordsmiths (Gilbert and Sullivan aside; Gilbert's illustrations enhance the libretti considerably - https://gsarchive.net/gilbert/artist/...) brought to the table. Many a sentence or verse that seems like low-level gibberish is turned into "nonsense, the divinest sense" because of a well-placed illustration infra or supra.

Additionally, there are genuinely arresting passages, both in the limericks and longer works, that linger in the mind for a far more extensive period than Lear likely imagined they would (he seems to be quite certain he's producing throwaway doggerel, even if he bothers to cleverly re-use characters like "Xerxes" and the "Quangle-Wangle" in multiple pieces throughout the Lear-verse). But I insist: "Great bards besides / In sage and solemn times have sung / Of tourneys and of trophies hung; / Of forests and enchantments drear / *Where more is meant than meets the ear.*"

To give a few examples: "Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos" is the story of a wife who can't stand a simple yet prosperous life atop a wall without whining about her fate, so her husband blows up the wall and kills her, himself, and their kids; "The New Vestments" is about a trend-setting hermit who outfits himself in meat and sweets and instead of being fawned over upon his return to "haute society" is nearly eaten alive by children and wild beasts; and "The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-Popple" is a ghastly fairy story about 49 offspring of seven animal families who are all killed because they failed to heed their parents' advice about various trivial matters, leading to the grief-stricken parents deciding to embalm themselves so they can be placed in an obscure back room of a local museum.

Highly recommended.

I remember being fascinated, when young, with what this man could do with the English language. Some of it still holds true. I'd never thought before reading this how much Dr. Seuss must have drawn on Lear.

This book aint joking when it said complete nonsense, cause it is

I cannot stress enough how horrible the limericks are. They often have extra syllables that mess up the rhythm, and often rhyme only because they repeat words. However, they, like all the other poems and stories, are accompanied by the authors own entertaining sketches, so I can almost forgive them.

The other songs and stories are wonderful enough that I'll just ignore the limericks.

Content warnings:
* Inter-species marriage.
* A husband refers to his wife as "Oh lovely Pussy, oh Pussy my love, what a wonderful Pussy you are..."
* A very nice rhinoceros is killed and stuffed just so he can be used as a "diaphanous door-scraper".

Many different collections are currently lumped together by the goodreads librarians. They'll probably never be fully straitened out. Here is the contents of the version I read:

The Book of Nonsense - Horrible limericks.
Nonsense Songs and Stories - Wonderful poems and one story (The four little children who went around the world).
100 Nonsense Pictures and Rhymes - More horrible limericks.
An Alphabet - An OK way to teach kids the alphabet, and words like Dolomphious and Runcible.
"How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear" - An OK poem.