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When they said, "Does it buzz?" he replied, "Yes, it does!"
The limericks of Edward Lear (1812-1888) prompted a mid-Victorian craze that flourishes to this day. Gorgeously illustrated new limericks appear in a 2015 issue of Poetry magazine (Madrid), a five-line skewering of Stalin is tucked into a recent New York Times obituary (Grimes).1The newly founded Edward Lear Society celebrates at the Knowsley estate, and the keeper of the Edward Lear website adds a new feature on Lear and Comics. The British Academy's Chatterton lecturer attends to Lear's birds, including the parrot that "seized" a man's nose and the raven that "danced a quadrille" (Bevis 39, 41) - Lear's first work, it must be remembered, was the magnificent Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832).2Of course he is best known today as a writer of nonsense (Peck 15). The illustrated limerick, his lighthearted venture into a double genre, perennially raises questions among his admirers and scholars about the internal dynamics linking its components. Borrowing from recent discussions of various picture-poem combinations, one might call the illustrated limericks in A Book of Nonsense "picture-limericks" (Dilworth 42), "imagetexts" (Mitchell, Picture Theory 89), or "iconotexts" (Louvel). As the labels all suggest, the core issue is the proximity of two media and whether or how they converge.
It's generally agreed, as Ann C. Colley, one of Lear's most discerning critics puts it, that the pictures in the Book of Nonsense exude a "kinetic energy" while "the words beneath them" caricature "the subject's peculiarities"; each portion authenticates "the hyperbolic mode" of the other ("Anti-Colonial Bestiary" 109). Colley conceptualizes the limericks as "visual-verbal puns" and argues for the interconnectedness of the reading-viewing experience ("Reversals of Nonsense" 297). Thomas Dilworth, who analyzes "trans-generic" (52) puns in ten of the best-known limericks, finds Lear giving "the pictures equality with and often primacy over the text" (42). He identifies the "intermodal relationship" that links the postures, gestures, and facial expressions to the poem's language (52). And yet, in Dilworth's view, the dynamics of this relationship have been under-appreciated, and what should be a rich body of commentary has been stymied by the doubleness of Lear's media. He states the difficulty succinctly: "the limericks are visual as well...