[Rory Waterman]

Originally Posted by Max Goodman

But did Ewart need to invent a word? Why is "pastiche" (according to Merriam Webster, "a literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work") do disused?

Pastiche can be used quite generally, and/or pejoratively, of course: "His work is essentially a pastiche or Georgian poesy." I suppose a parapoem is a kind of pastiche - a very particular, specifically and thoroughly intertextual pastiche, without biting back at or taking the piss out of the original. Ewart wrote this, which is in the same form and of the same length as Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings', echoes a lot of the language of the original, etc.