Edward Lear's Comic Verse Includes Insect Imagery in the Nonsense Tradition
Poets involved
What happened
Edward Lear, the Victorian master of nonsense verse and limericks, frequently used insects — flies, gnats, beetles, and various imaginary creeping things — as elements of his comic verse and illustrated self-portraits. Lear's nonsense poems, beginning with A Book of Nonsense (1846), create a world in which the conventional hierarchy of creatures is happily inverted and insects participate as equals in comic scenarios. Lear's self-caricatures often showed him surrounded by his characteristic entourage of nonsense creatures including insects.
Literary impact
Lear's comic insects belong to a tradition of deliberately lowering the register of verse through the introduction of crawling, biting, and generally unpleasant creatures in order to deflate pretension and create delight. His influence on Lewis Carroll's Alice books — in which insects play significant roles including the Gnat who makes Alice cry and the Bread-and-butterfly — reinforced the Victorian tradition of literary insects as vehicles for philosophical play in the guise of nonsense. Both Lear and Carroll drew on the same cultural reality: that insects were familiar, unavoidable presences in Victorian life, too common to be entirely banished from literature.
Source: Wikipedia
