This is Bob Newman's poetry parodies site. While my verse forms site is supposed to be educational, this one is purely for fun. Not quite all the items here are verse parodies; I have no excuse for including the Hemingway story, except that people have found it funny. Where (as in most cases) the parody is based on a particular poem, I have given that poem's name in the right-hand column.
Poet | Title of parody | Title of original poem (if any) |
W H Auden | O what am I buying? | O where are you going? |
Hilaire Belloc | Superstring Theory | Henry King |
John Betjeman | Burgh Heath | |
William Blake | Hamster, Hamster | Tyger, Tyger |
G K Chesterton | The Shamus | The Donkey |
John Clare | Little Dotty Poet | Little Trotty Wagtail |
e e cummings | e e c | anyone lived in a pretty how town |
T S Eliot | The Journal of the Santas | The Journey of the Magi |
Ernest Hemingway | The Froth Also Rises (prose) | |
Gerard Manley Hopkins | Limp Little Lyric Motorway |
Inversnaid |
Ted Hughes | Cat - published in Cats Behaving Badly (Barnes & Noble, New York, 2000) | |
Rudyard Kipling | If | If |
Frank Kuppner | A Bad Day for the Kuppner Dynasty | A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty |
John Lennon/Paul McCartney | Yestersocks | Yesterday |
Louis MacNeice | Bagpipe Encore | Bagpipe Music |
John Masefield | Road Rage | Sea Fever |
Roger McGough/Brian Patten | Little Johnny's Other Confession | Little Johnny's Confession, Let me die a youngman's death, etc |
John Milton | On his patrons' kindness | On his blindness |
Ogden Nash | Money for Old Rope (or, Give him an inch and he'll lose the metre) | |
Henry Reed | Integration by Parts | Naming of Parts |
Robert W Service | The Writing of Frank McHugh | The Shooting of Dan McGrew |
William Shakespeare | Sonnet MacPhail The Bradford Bard (‘Appen, an’ ‘appen not/The next day, and the next day, and the next/Eh up, lads, come, let’s gie it one more go!) |
Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?" MacBeth, scenes from Act 1 with the three witches Hamlet, "To be, or not to be?"; Macbeth, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow"; Henry V before Harfleurs, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" |
Percy Bysshe Shelley | Percy's Progress | Ozymandias |
Dylan Thomas | Do not sleep sober or alone this night | Do not go gentle into that good night |
Edward Thomas | Traffic Stop | Adlestrop |
R S Thomas | In the Clan | On the Farm |
C K Williams | Breakfast | |
Hank Williams | Your Chitin Heart | Your Cheatin' Heart |
John Hartley Williams | Albion | Canada, Hungarian |
William Carlos Williams | I just couldn't resist | This is just to say |
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© Bob Newman 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. All rights reserved.
This page last updated 27/02/2007