“On Edward Lear’s ‘The Scroobious Pip’”

At The Paris Review Online.

 

Teaser quote: “In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so.”

[originally posted 8 February 2014 on Anthony Opal’s The Weekly; reprinted at Paris Review Daily, Wednesday 8 November 2017]