View Single Post
  #1  
Unread 12-31-2017, 06:14 PM
Tony Barnstone's Avatar
Tony Barnstone Tony Barnstone is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 749
Default Post Your Parody Poems, Please!

Hi Folks,

I am collecting good parodies of great poems for a survey of English and American literature I'm teaching (1750- present day). I've found quite a few online, such as G.K. Chesterton's hilarious spoof of Walt Whitman (I'll post it below), but am thinking that many of you have ones you wouldn't mind sharing with the students. If so, please post them below!

Best, Tony

G. K. Chesterton pretending to be Walt Whitman
This is the third section in Chesterton’s poem “Variations on an Air,” which is first a parody of Tennyson, then of Yeats, and then of Whitman:

Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me,
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.

And here is Annie Finch on some other Whitman parodies: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/har...itman-parodies
Reply With Quote