Best Parodies of Great Poems?

Tony Barnstone · #1 12-31-2017, 09:52 AM

CLOSING DOWN THIS THREAD AND REOPENING IT AT DRILLS & AMUSEMENTS SO PEOPLE CAN POST THEIR OWN POEMS! THANKS.

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

Tony Barnstone · #2 12-31-2017, 09:53 AM

Emily Dickinson

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.

Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.

~ Wendy Cope

Roger Slater · #3 12-31-2017, 09:56 AM

I believe the forum rules prevent people here from posting their own poems, so you might want to receive a special dispensation or move the thread to D&A where posting one's own work is permitted.

Roger Slater · #4 12-31-2017, 09:59 AM

I think we're allowed to link to our own work, though. So here is my parody of Roethke's "The Waking." And here is my parody of Yeats's "Irish Airman" poem.

John Isbell · #5 12-31-2017, 10:27 AM

Roger, thank you for sharing that link to your Irish chicken - I think it is wonderful. And thank you, Tony, for posting Chesterton's Whitman parody, which is lovely. Maybe Ginsberg's Whitman homage would do as well?
Parodies. An Anthology, edited by Dwight MaacDonald, and Wyndham Lewis's The Stuffed Owl are I guess too well-known to quote from here, but I always enjoy Max Beerbohm, and "'Savonarola' Brown", in Seven Men and Two Others, is my favorite Shakespeare parody:

Tho' love be sweet, revenge is sweeter far.
To the Piazza! Ha, ha ha, ha, har!

Happy New Year,
John

Andrew Szilvasy · #6 12-31-2017, 10:39 AM

I know you're asking for some of ours, but in the (slight) chance that you don't know of Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" I figured it was worth posting.