How Pleasant To Know Mr Lear! Indeed: what a privilege to be in his runcible world. Best well known for his limericks, this book includes his letters, drawings, musings and longer poems too. What a wonderful, nonsensical, scroobulous world Lear made.

This has been the perfect lighthearted bathroom reading for the past several months

Tô fazendo um dos cursos de inverno na USP cujo tema é o nonsense nas artes, cinema e literatura. Não dá pra falar sobre nada disso sem citar o pai de todos: Edward Lear. Já o tinha o lido, mas não especificamente essa edição que é a mais completa de todas, aqui fica mais do que claro o quanto ele influenciou o século XX.

Poetry is sometimes hard to get into, but I really liked this book of nonsense. The short stories were cute as well. I wish Lear had written more such silliness!

Fun to read, the limericks were funny and my favorite poem is the jumbles, I also liked the pobble who has no toes, and the owl and the pussycat. And the nonsense botany was pretty funny. The Alfabet poems were fun.

An absolutely wonderful and funny book for all human beings be they adult or child. Put this book on your list to keep on hand to read to any children in your life. Children have fabulous senses of humor. Edward Lear is just as smart and funny today as he was in the mid 19th century when he lived, wrote, and illustrated. No home should be without this book.

Like an original Shel Silverstein, or at least the Victorian variety. Mum shared this with me when I was little, and it still holds a dear place in my heart. We lived in England, and each night before school I'd read. This book was often my friend through the night. All night long I'd read, and later my mum would tell me of her own love for the Dong and the Jumblies, and still I love this book so much. Once he catches your heart and mind, it belongs to him forever.

I remember the book being funnier when I was a child. It is still full of limericks, a very silly alphabet, and a few classic pieces of poetry.

The most wonderful nonsense book of all time

How can I give less than five stars to a book that contains not only the Owl and the Pussycat but the Jumblies and the Pobble with no toes. Read and enjoy.

The poems (which make up most of the book) are great fun, but the nonsense tales have not dated well. The one with the seven baby birds, fish, guinea pigs etc where they all get killed then their parents all commit suicide was horrendous - what on earth was going on in his life to make him write that?! I was reading this to try to cheer myself up and then he sprang that on me!

The limerick about the person from Cromer really tickled me. Not sure why that is my favourite, but it is.

Loved this when I was a kid. Love it now. This book gave me a love for limericks

Nonsense comes in many varieties. Some would argue that nonsense needs to, by definition, not make sense. That’s a pretty restrictive definition that would exclude most of the work of Lear and Carroll. A broader definition encompasses any verse or writing that is absurdly humorous or perversely illogical (or perversely logical, for that matter). From Hey Diddle Diddle to Monty Python’s fish slapping skit, nonsense has a long history.

Nonsense, though, is wasted on children. They live their lives in one continuous blur of sights and colors and sounds that make little sense to them. They live in the freedom of nonsense. Adults, however, need nonsense. Confronted by the daily dissonance between idea and reality, logic and illogic, reason and craziness, intent and result, adults become contorted into knots of rationalization and submerged anger/fear as they try to force sense upon everything (when, in fact, most things are nonsensical).

Nonsense unties these knot and lets us see the worst of the world – and helps us understand it – by putting it in terms of its own (il)logic. We can let go of the pretense and the self-inflicted fiction. Some things are too awful to be put into a tragedy. For these, comedy is the only available form, for if we didn’t laugh at them, logic and reason dictate a stark response.

Thus the works of Edward Lear: Unhinged, absurd, eclectic, bizarre, violent and humorous. Individually, they are oddities, but on the whole, Lear provides a fantastically entertaining read that is hard to put down. If you find a moral, so be it. But don’t go looking for one.

Lear's first book, A Book of Nonsense (1846), is particularly violent and unsuited for children. A man is smashed with a gong, a man is smashed with a hammer, one cuts off his thumbs, one is drowned, another is knocked down with a poker, or jumps off a cliff (after reading Homer), a wife is kept in a coffin-like box her entire life, and so on. Peter Cottontail this is not. Lear’s world is weird and dangerous and full of strange characters. “They” are a menacing presence always threatening to destroy non-conforming behavior.

Lear’s later books are much lighter and more children-oriented, but they still contain the humor and pathos of his earlier work, even if they lose a bit of the dark edge. The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat, and The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo are sensuous pleasures to the ears and the mind.

Give up the need to make sense of everything and enjoy Lear...

Who has written such volumes of stuff!

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few think him pleasant enough.