The Cult of Parody
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE CULT OF PARODY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "The cult of parody, in fact, belongs to that literary culture which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of...
...After perusing his contents, one could add to the list, light verse by Americans and women...
...biographical introduction by James Kraft...
...Like all forms of comedy, parody has a liberating and rejuvenating effect, as the Greeks recognized by concluding their tragedies with a satyr play, or the Elizabethan dramatists by juxtaposing serious scenes with clown-acts...
...Variation on an Air composed on having to appear in a pageant as Old King Cole" contains five loving versions of the nursery-rhyme: as it might have been written by Tennyson, at his most Arthurian...
...This is one of the gems to be found in Kingsley Amis' The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse (347 pp., $13.95...
...Under the general editorship of James Kraft, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has just reissued Selected Poems (edited, with a critical introduction, by Richard Wilbur...
...Amis has done a great service in reprinting the lesser-known masterpiece, "Hiawatha's Photographing," which, in the cadences of the Longfellow epic, mocks Carroll's own hobby...
...To be a successful parodist, one must be an equal, if not superior craftsman to one's intended victim...
...If Morgan's last "Fragment" had appeared two years later in The Jade Mountain as a translation from Li Po, only scholars would have been the wiser (though, as a matter of fact, Morgan's spectral hand is pretty evident throughout The Chinese Translations...
...You prophetic of American largeness,/You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States...
...and arranged for the first American publication of A. E. Housman...
...By 1927, "The Posthumous Poems of Emanuel Morgan" betrayed Bynner's growing obsession with Chinese verse...
...and The Chinese Translations (introduction to The Jade Mountain by Burton Watson, introduction to The Way of Life According to Lao-tzu by David Lattimore...
...Writers & Writing THE CULT OF PARODY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "The cult of parody, in fact, belongs to that literary culture which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of creative genius and originality...
...Light Verse and Satires (edited, with an introduction, by William Jay Smith...
...He's a boomerang...
...Lewis Carroll's "How Doth the Little Crocodile" and "You are old, Father William" have outlasted Watts and Southey...
...But once the hoax was exposed, their own Spectrists came back to haunt them...
...The liberating effect parody can have is amply demonstrated in the career of Witter Bynner (1881-1968...
...Nevertheless, Auden's graceful, cosmopolitan introduction provided the right mood for appreciation...
...But before he could escape back into himself, his small poetic gift had rubbed wings with something rich and strange...
...Bynner's most famous accomplishment was the "Spectra" hoax, concocted with the help of fellow-poet Arthur Davison Ficke in 1916, when "Imagism," "Vorticism" and all the other "ism" movements had been around long enough to become tiresome...
...and by Whitman, the grass-roots Tarzan ("Me clairvoyant,/Me conscious of you, old camarado...
...A fervent believer in Whitmanian democracy, his early verse is a melting-pot of styles so eclectic that, as Louis Untermeyer once remarked, "Many of his poems seem like sounding-boards that echo the tones of every poet except the composer of them...
...And one is of an old half- wilted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony And indicates that two and one are three, That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep: And, Wordsworth, both are thine...
...by Yeats, fey and Celtic-twilighty...
...Pauker's sense of rhythm and language is so inferior, his eye so much less sharp than his targets, that his efforts fall flat...
...Witter Bynner joined the cult of parody to put Amy Lowell in her place...
...No one need read the effusions of the one-time laureate, Alfred Austin, to appreciate Owen Seaman's devastating "Birthday Ode," or have an intimate familiarity with the hymnal to recognize the acid wit of C. S. Lewis' "Lead us, Evolution, lead us...
...The Beloved Stranger (1918), published as Bynner's work, is unmistakably Morgan...
...388 pp., $20.00...
...In some mysterious fashion, this alter-ego helped Bynner transform himself from an imitator into a distinctive writer of light verse...
...For him, we need Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third," Hartley Coleridge's "Wordsworth Unvisited" and Lewis Carroll's "The White Knight's Song" to clear the air...
...301 pp., $20.00...
...In every case, Chesterton has captured the style and a certain philosophic silliness peculiar to each poet...
...He knew everybody...
...The skill is such, however, that many of their virtues peep through as well, and, in any case, it is all in the spirit of pure fun...
...On the other hand, one is brought up short in comparing two parodies by Ted Pauker (of W. M. Praed and G. K. Chesterton) with the originals, also reprinted...
...This transcends parody to enter the realm of high nonsense...
...Were your face...
...The editor is also to be credited with the discovery of another prodigy: Chesterton -always a staple of light verse anthologies, but seldom regarded as a parodist...
...I Leer" manages a sublime silliness akin to a certain manner of Wallace Stevens ("If I might be tall negroes in procession/Carrying each of them a rib of you...
...In 1920, Morgan went to press again with Pins for Wings-Satiric squibs at the poetic elite: Pound was "a book-worm/in tights...
...Among the lyrics swallowed whole by the literary world, from Edgar Lee Masters to William Carlos Williams, was Morgan's "Opus 40," beginning: Two cocktails round a smile, A grapefruit after grace, Flowers in an aisle...
...by Swinburne, hinting at sexual debauchery through a metric gallop...
...Anne Knish preferred free verse, and such passionate outcries as "I will not consort with reformed corpses,/I the life-lover, I the abundant...
...Amis (who has outgrown the "angry young man" phase to become a querulous elder statesman) devotes much of his preface to a catalogue of dislikes: epigrams, limericks, Edward Lear, and humorous poems written by people born after 1920...
...Morgan, himself, "a bat/and a butterfly/mating...
...Writing as "Emanuel Morgan" and "Anne Knish," respectively, Bynner and Ficke brought forth the "Spectric" school, dedicated to disjointed imagery and risque themes...
...In fact, a certain insularity is evident here: Having had his fill of poems satirizing Celtic and colonial aspirations for home rule (apparently an intrinsically comic subject to Englishmen), the foibles of forgotten MPs, clergy, or long-dead Oxford dons, the Yankee reader may begin to long for "Cocaine Lil...
...Alfred Kreymborg, who had been a fervent admirer of Morgan and Knish, had his revenge by insisting that he still preferred their work to anything by their creators, and Bynner himself ruefully confessed, "I find now that I write like [Morgan] without the slightest effort-I don't know where he leaves off and I begin...
...In subsequent years, he produced a spate of humorous pieces (some printed for the first time in Selected Poems and Light Verse and Satires) that would have been assets to Amis' Oxford anthology...
...But what about Wordsworth the long-winded bore and prig...
...was involved in a triangle with Edna St...
...It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep...
...Aiken, "phosphorescent/pluming...
...it is the good doctor himself, in full tilt against the philistines...
...254 pp., $20.00...
...Housecleaning appears to describe the metamorphic quality of Bynner's life: We opened an unopened drawer And found what we had found before, Neckties with patterns out of date And other minor toys of fate And a sudden portrait of us two When you were I and I was you...
...Carroll, the unsurpassed master, was fond of observing that he often took off on poems he admired...
...Bynner was one of those minor poets whose life was at least as interesting as its productions...
...He has gathered some very funny ones indeed, and it is not always necessary to know the original to enjoy a burlesque...
...Still, there is much to enjoy in this culling, for as ballads most fascinated Auden, parody interests Amis...
...When Leavis asks rhetorically what parody teaches us about "the great Wordsworth" it can truly be admitted, "Nothing...
...I heartily disagree...
...Harriet Monroe, "the Mother Superior/considers lingerie...
...by Browning, so deliberately archaic and obscure as to forecast Pound...
...Chesterton was attracted to the ridiculous as an expression of humanity...
...Might I not be too comforted to weep...
...Not that parody has to be destructive...
...No, this is not the winning entry of a New Statesman competition for a parody of F. R. Leavis...
...The two pranksters originally meant to poke fun at a gullible literary clique, and for a time they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations...
...He went to Harvard with FDR and Wallace Stevens...
...J. K. Stephen's "A Sonnet" speaks for every exasperated reader in its observation that: Two voices are there: one is of the deep...
...Vincent Millet and, later, with the D. H. Lawrences (he appears as a minor character in The Plumed Serpent...
...The collection supercedes the 40-year-old volume edited by W. H. Auden, who included such "proletarian" ballads as "Casey Jones," "Cocaine Lil," even Kipling's sombre "Danny Deever"-a quirky definition of "light...
Vol. 61 • August 1978 • No. 17
