‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear

Downey, Edmund; Wilcockson, Amy

Abstract

An unpublished poem entitled ‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’ by artist, travel-writer, and poet, Edward Lear (1812–88) has come to light in the British Library’s Charnwood Autographs Collection.1 The autograph manuscript is dated 22 September 1882, during the five-year period from 1878 to 1883 when Lear summered on Monte Generoso, a mountain bordering Italy and Switzerland. This finding offers a valuable addition to Lear’s poetic corpus and deals with Lear’s dissatisfaction with his surroundings in the busy tourist-filled Hotel Monte Generoso, fictionalized through a nonsensical lens. The seven stanzas contain many of the tropes and characters of Lear’s typical nonsense poetry, including octopods, elephants, and ducks. However, the poem is also an unusually morbid and lugubrious example of Lear’s verse

Citation

Downey, E., & Wilcockson, A. (2020). ‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear. Notes and Queries, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz207

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 23, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Jan 28, 2020
• Publication Date: Jan 28, 2020
• Deposit Date: Feb 14, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 14, 2020
• Journal: Notes and Queries
• Print ISSN: 0029-3970
• Electronic ISSN: 1471-6941
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz207
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language; Literature and Literary Theory; Library and Information Sciences; Language and Linguistics
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3959887
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/nq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/notesj/gjz207/5716711
• Additional Information: ‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear Author: Wilcockson, Amy; Downey, Edmund Publication: Notes and Queries Publisher: Oxford University Press Date: 2020-01-28 Copyright © 2020, Oxford University Press