I am an administrator of a Poetry Group called Poetry in my Mind. This week we had an assignment that took much more time than other weeks. We chose one of our favorite poets. We mentioned important information about him. We were to also post one of his poems, explain what form it was, and then write a poem in form and similar.
Here is the link to the poetry group I am involved in. If you would like to partake in the contest, let me know. You must be a Facebook member, so that I can send you a special invite to contests. There is a weekly and a monthly contest.
I chose Edward Lear, for his silly, no-nonsense poems. This is what I had to say.
I am writing about the poet Edward Lear.
Edward Lear (12 or 13 May 1812[1][2] – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson’s poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson’s poetry.
Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of twenty-one children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear.[3] He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Owing to the family’s limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age.[4]
Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and during later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. His adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood. He suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as “the Morbids
Lear’s nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet’s delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary
Form is AABBA
(Ad. Ex.)
There was once a girl named Sue
Who feared the word called boo.
She jumped out of her skin
When you said it again
She was crazy; this girl called Sue.
Written by,
Terry Shepherd
Who I am 