How to Parody a Poem
Parody literature is almost as old as literature itself. In Aristotle's "Poetics" we learn that Hegemon of Thasos often parodied the works of Athenian dramatists by altering the lines of plays. Miguel de Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote" in part as a parody of chivalric prose romances, and Henry Fielding's great comic novel "Shamela" spoofs his contemporary Samuel Richardson's "Pamela." The recently published Oxford Book of Parodies contains examples of parodies of and by authors as disparate as Jane Austen, Max Beerbohm, John Updike and Phillip Roth.
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Instructions
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Upstage the mood and sentiments of the poem. With his "The Dover Bitch," Anthony Hecht lampooned Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," and did it so deftly because he turned Arnold's solemn lament for the decline of religious faith into an irreverent account of sexual frustration:
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
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Introduce anachronisms. In his parody of the well-known Middle English lyric "Sumer Is Icumen In," Ezra Pound changes the well-known line "Lhude sing cuccu!" to "Lhude sing Goddamm." In Act I, Scene 2 of "Scots on the Rocks," a parody of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" by Richard Nathan, King Duncan calls out: "What bloody man is this, with the cuts and the wounds, and the ow-ies. Somebody get this man a Band-Aid!"
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Change the subject matter of the poem. Christopher T. George's parody of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is about Orson Welles.
Where Eliot wrote:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
George writes:
Hollywood is the cruelest place, breeding
anorexia in the brightest starlets, mixing
money and desire, stirring
dull talent with sharp aspirations.
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