PARODY.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 894, 13 August 1910, Page 9

PARODY.

Mr. Owen Seaman was tho chief guest.at a recent dinner given by the Poets' Club. Mr. HerbeVt Trench. prosided. ~• . ■ . .- Speaking after dinner on tho subject of ''Parody," Mr. Owen Seaman said lie had never had the zeal or curiosity to make any sort of. serious study of the development of that-noble art. In its lowest form parody, did not make great demands on one. It was easy to take a poem' .like "Casabianca" and turn "The boy stood on,the .burning deck" into "The girl sat on the/fryingpan." But it required some little ingenuity to .preserve throughout the poem a consistency of even so futile an adaptation. Because , this form of parody was so easy, the whole art of parody/ had often been regarded with contempt. . Legitimate ridicule was seeii in its crudest form when a parodist took some individual's work and by exaggeration ridiculed the author's plot rather than his stylo. A higher stago was reached when the parodist, not following the subject-matter of the original, chose a subject of his own, and showed how , tho author might be expected to handle it. A harder; task was to reproduce tlie permanent. qualities of an author's style, and in its. highest development parody aimed at , this. ;,' " :