One of the marks of the serious poet is that they develop a unique, instantly recognisable style of their own, a trademark voice that means regular readers of verse can tell their Shakespeare from their Milton, their Browning from their Dickinson, at a glance. The flip side of this is that the more distinctive a style is, the easier it is to send up. Indeed, many of our most original poets have found themselves the subject of numerous parodists, whose work can range from gentle, affectionate ribbing to witty but well-placed literary stilettos.
Joan Murray’s We Old Dudes is on the gentle end of the spectrum. Her Republican-voting, golf-playing pensioners are a fine balance to Gwendolyn Brooks’ seven pool-playing juvenile delinquents in the poem that inspired Murray’s parody, a poem that could, itself, be read as a gentle poke in the ribs of the Beats. As is the case with many such send-ups, Murray is also making a serious point: everyone has a story and everyone ends up in the grave.
Somewhat less gentle is the anonymous The Modern Hiawatha, a sharp take on Longfellow’s insistent use of anaphora, mesodiplosis and other forms of repetition in his famous Song of Hiawatha, and also of the sense of bathos that these devices can often create, in part, at least, because of a tendency to over-explain everything by saying the same thing several times. Having encountered the anonymous take-off, it’s pretty much impossible to read the original without smiling.
In a sense, this is part of the point of any good literary parody; if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the spoof may well be the most efficient form of criticism. This appears to have been the case with Paul Dehn, whose A Leaden Anthology of English Verse politely eviscerates a wide range of minor, and not so minor, versifiers. Many of his parodies are linked to his fear of a nuclear war, but his take on Jenny Kiss’d Me by Leigh Hunt hinges on a less apocalyptic disaster, the common cold.
Another inveterate parodist was Charles Stuart Calverley. His The Cock and the Bull neatly captures almost all of Robert Browning’s mannerisms: the dated slang, odd abbreviations and elisions and forced conversational tones are captured in a bravura mickey-take of The Ring and the Book.
Perhaps the finest of all verse parodists was Lewis Carroll. Carroll had a fine nose for the sententious and took particular delight in pricking the bubble of poems that were bumptiously moralising. His You Are Old, Father William completely deflates the didactic balloon of Robert Southey’s smugly dreadful The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them; Southey’s comforts are turned to absurdities and his moral rectitude becomes blithe stupidity. The Aged, Aged Man, his parody of Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence is even more effective. Carroll manages not only to skewer the poem; Wordsworth’s entire persona as the detached dreamer who lives among, but is not part of, the noble savages of his poems is put to the sword.
If Carroll is prince of parodists, TS Eliot has a fair claim to be the king of their victims. There is an air of portentousness about Eliot’s writing that is catnip to the eager imitator. Henry Reed’s Chard Whitlow captures this beautifully. The juxtaposition of meditative sentences in hesitant syntax with sudden images of urban decay; the unexplained phrase in a foreign language; the linking of Hindu mysticism and Blitz fire-fighting – what could be more Eliotic? In her Waste Land Limericks, Wendy Cope focuses less on style and more on substance, but the result is just as effective. I suspect that Eliot might have laughed at Cope’s jokes; after all, he was known to dabble in parody himself.
And so, this month’s Poster Poems challenge is to write a parody of a famous, or infamous, poem. You may go for the gentle option or you might prefer a more full-blooded approach. Your parody might be an affectionate joust with a favourite poem or a full-blooded act of revenge on the poem you hated at school. So don’t hold back, sharpen those quills and get to it.
