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onset of the progressive disease that finally killed him, and some drawings and illegible scraps of verse in the later pages bear the subscription ‘The Priory 1965 and 1966’, dating them to the years when Peake was accommodated in a psychiatric hospital at Roehampton in south London. But the poems in the earlier pages of the book are beautifully transcribed, despite the shakiness of the writer’s fingers, and the title ‘Songs of Nonsense’ suggests that he intended them to form a collection. We have dated this notebook to 1957 and after, 1957 being the year when Peake’s physical and psychological condition began to deteriorate rapidly following the failure of his play The Wit to Woo on the London stage. Besides these, there are the remains of a third, undatable, exercise book inscribed ‘Nonsence Poems’, which we refer to by its Bodleian shelf mark (Bod. Dep. Peake 16), and dozens of other verses, both handwritten and typed. Further investigation of the archive may well reveal additional nonsense among the jumbled heaps of paper of which it was partly composed when we consulted it – to say nothing of the material that might emerge from Peake’s correspondence in private hands. The title, then, of this book – Complete Nonsense – is not quite accurate. The claim that we are presenting our readers with all Peake’s nonsense does not stand up to scrutiny, not just because there may be more that we’ve missed, but also because (as his admirers often point out) everything he wrote was coloured by nonsense: novels, plays, short stories, ‘serious’ poems, etc. We might more accurately have called our edition Collected Nonsense Verse, had it not contained ‘The Adventures of Footfruit’, which is written in musical prose. The title, then, is complete nonsense, as was the title of another recent edition of Peake’s verse, Collected Poems. That phrase implied that the collection contained all his poetry between its handsome covers – yet here is a second volume, three years later, with over a hundred poems in it, some of them substantial, about thirty of which have never been published before (though some of these are drafts of poems that have been published, so that claim too is a little shaky). The primary reason for leaving out the nonsense from the Collected Poems was lack of space; but a secondary reason was that Peake seems to have thought of his nonsense verse as of a wholly different species from his serious poetry – though the categories overlapped, as is evident from the presence of drafts of The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb in a notebook devoted to nonsense. In the 1940s he published his book of nonsense rhymes and images, Rhymes Without Reason 2
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(1944), separately from his book of poetry, Shapes and Sounds (1941), and it looks as though he was planning a second volume of nonsense songs to complement his second poetry collection, The Glassblowers (1950), at the point when illness claimed him. We feel, then, that he would have been pleased to see his life’s work in these two distinct poetic modes represented in separate volumes, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of his death (2008) and the centenary of his birth (2011) respectively. The present book spans even more of Peake’s writing career than the Collected Poems does, tracing a golden thread of inspired irrationality that runs through all the literary and artistic metamorphoses of this most protean of creators. Like the Collected Poems, it is arranged in chronological order, and we have found it possible to date nearly all the verse with some precision; only one poem remains wholly undated. The first entry in the book was written when he was seven, and it is followed by a cluster of poems from his days as an art student – notably the group we have called the ‘Railway Ditties’ (pp. 23–4), which were inspired by the names of the stations on the railway line between his home at Wallington, Surrey and the Royal Academy Schools in central London. The last substantial piece – ‘The Adventures of Footfruit’ (pp. 208-18) – shows him planning an ambitious new departure, a kind of epic prose poem, even as terminal illness was taking hold. In between, as with the serious poems, one gets the sense that there were periods of his life when he composed nonsense with greater or lesser intensity: the years following his release from the army, for instance, culminating in the publication of Rhymes Without Reason (1944); or 1947, when he wrote The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb on Sark, and produced (as this edition makes clear) a host of other long poems in ballad form to keep it company; the early stages of his final illness, when some of his finest nonsense saw the light of day. As with his serious poetry, his output of nonsense verse slowed down in the early to mid 1950s, when he concentrated on writing plays for stage and radio, but his plays are always breaking into song. Indeed, one of them (Noah’s Ark) is effectively a musical, while he had plans to turn The Wit to Woo into a musical and Gormenghast into an opera, and the songs he wrote for them are invariably nonsense, so we have included them in this book. Absurdity was bred into Peake’s bones, rooted in his flesh, locked in the fibres of his brain, and he raised it at times to a pitch of seriousness that only Lear and Carroll could match, so that (as he puts it in ‘I Cannot Give the Reasons’, p. 189) ‘it has a beauty / Most 3

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onset of the progressive disease that finally killed him, and some drawings and illegible scraps of verse in the later pages bear the subscription ‘The Priory 1965 and 1966’, dating them to the years when Peake was accommodated in a psychiatric hospital at Roehampton in south London. But the poems in the earlier pages of the book are beautifully transcribed, despite the shakiness of the writer’s fingers, and the title ‘Songs of Nonsense’ suggests that he intended them to form a collection. We have dated this notebook to 1957 and after, 1957 being the year when Peake’s physical and psychological condition began to deteriorate rapidly following the failure of his play The Wit to Woo on the London stage. Besides these, there are the remains of a third, undatable, exercise book inscribed ‘Nonsence Poems’, which we refer to by its Bodleian shelf mark (Bod. Dep. Peake 16), and dozens of other verses, both handwritten and typed. Further investigation of the archive may well reveal additional nonsense among the jumbled heaps of paper of which it was partly composed when we consulted it – to say nothing of the material that might emerge from Peake’s correspondence in private hands.

The title, then, of this book – Complete Nonsense – is not quite accurate. The claim that we are presenting our readers with all Peake’s nonsense does not stand up to scrutiny, not just because there may be more that we’ve missed, but also because (as his admirers often point out) everything he wrote was coloured by nonsense: novels, plays, short stories, ‘serious’ poems, etc. We might more accurately have called our edition Collected Nonsense Verse, had it not contained ‘The Adventures of Footfruit’, which is written in musical prose. The title, then, is complete nonsense, as was the title of another recent edition of Peake’s verse, Collected Poems. That phrase implied that the collection contained all his poetry between its handsome covers – yet here is a second volume, three years later, with over a hundred poems in it, some of them substantial, about thirty of which have never been published before (though some of these are drafts of poems that have been published, so that claim too is a little shaky). The primary reason for leaving out the nonsense from the Collected Poems was lack of space; but a secondary reason was that Peake seems to have thought of his nonsense verse as of a wholly different species from his serious poetry – though the categories overlapped, as is evident from the presence of drafts of The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb in a notebook devoted to nonsense. In the 1940s he published his book of nonsense rhymes and images, Rhymes Without Reason

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