Competition | 10 October 2009

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

In Competition No. 2616 you were invited to continue Edward Lear’s self-portrait in verse — ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ — or T.S. Eliot’s response — ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot’ — for a further 15 lines, substituting the name of the poet of your choice, or sticking to the originals if you preferred. Lear’s poem, and Eliot’s response, proved to be a fruitful starting point, prompting an avalanche of entries in which Larkin, Eliot and Pound made regular appearances and were mostly unpleasant to meet.

I stumbled across Lear’s masterclass in the art of self-deprecation on the Edward Lear Home Page where I had come to revisit Auden’s portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense. ‘Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white/ Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose/ Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,/ A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.’