United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these poets whether it be "A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses" or "A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day" is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written in dead earnest.
Michael Zoshchenko is the only one who has, in a small way, reached perfection in his rendering of the common slang of a private soldier. But his art savours too much of a pastiche; he is really a born parodist and may some day give us a Russian Christmas Garland. The most striking feature of all these story-tellers is their almost complete inability to tell a story.
'E never puts 'is napper up Above the parapet. We been in France fer seven months An' 'aven't seen 'im yet!" So sang Tommy, the incorrigible parodist, during the long summer days and nights of 1915, when he was impatiently waiting for something to turn up. For three months and more we were face to face with an enemy whom we rarely saw. It was a weird experience.
The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and the excellence of that style which no rival has been able to equal and no parodist to degrade; which displays in their highest perfection the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music.
This little book will be fortunate far beyond its deserts if it tempts a few readers to extend the circle of their visionary acquaintances, of friends who, like Brahma, know not birth, nor decay, "sleep, waking, nor trance." A theme more delicate and intimate than that of our Friends in fiction awaits a more passionate writer than the present parodist.
For when to the Letter on Trades the following extenuating postscript is found necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist: "If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on Amusements, I have written somewhat sarcastically of 'the brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets, be credit given to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt the resources of the poor.
Or, as a poor bungling parodist revamped it: Pep is the stuff to put Old Time on skids Pep in your copy, yes, and lots of kids. It is true that Shakespeare hints another way of doing you in, which is to write sonnets as good as his. This way, needless to add, is open to few.
That is true, and indeed as a parodist Sir George Trevelyan belongs to the metrical miocene. His Horace, when serving as a volunteer in the Republican Army, bursts into a pretty snatch of song which has a flavour of Moore:
Waddington's book was finished the sooner Ralph's book would come out; and under this agreeable stimulus she had developed into the perfect parodist of Waddington.
But she has not even begun to learn the richer lesson of laughing with them. The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as whether it is not obviously true.
Word Of The Day