Thursday, October 16, 2008

Parody in Yeats, Brooks, and Hudgins

Oh my goodness, I woke up today planning to read the three posts for today and then realized that I was one of those posts, so I'm sorry its so late but here's my contribution.

Andrew Hudgins combines the themes from both "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks and "The Wild Swans at Coole" by William Yeats in his parody "The Wild Swans Skip School". In his parody Hudgins aims to show his admiration for the two poets in a humorous way. It seems that he admires Yeats the most, the title for the parody rhymes with Yeats' original title. While the author most likely does admire Brooks, the reader gets the feeling that Hudgins uses her form and themes simply to contrast with Yeats's original ideas.

Hudgins specifically mentions Yeats in the third line of his poem and it seems as though he is playfully making fun of Yeats interpretation of the swans. In "The Wild Swans at Coole" Yeats uses an admiring and majestic tone with regards to the swans, while Hudgins portrays them as delinquents that skip school, similar to the characters in "We Real Cool". Also later in the poem Hudgins writes "We / won't stay. We / fly 'way." In these lines, the swans are mocking how Yeats admired their the swan couple. Also the final line in "The Swans Skip School" is almost like a much less beautiful version of Yeats' final line "To find they have flown away?"

The sentence "We / scorn Yeats" by Hudgins makes it seem as though the swans are ridiculing Yeats for his drastic misinterpretation of their nature, and he is also linking the behavior of the pool players to swans which could also be a parody of Brook's characters. Hudgins is not mocking either of the two poets, since he chose to combine their work and it is even more unlikely since both poets were highly acclaimed. Hudgins is simply showing his admiration for two works and a interesting link he has found between two seemingly unrelated works. Why would he be mocking two completely unrelated poems by combining the elements of both of them? It is much more likely that Hudgins is showing admiration for two poems he admires.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I agree that Hudgins’ poem is a tribute to both Yeats’ and Brooks’ poem. Hudgins used the idea of swans from Yeats, but used the form from Brooks because it is unique. Hudgins does mentioned Yeats in the third line, in order to show reader that yes he is parodying Yeats’ poem. In “We/ won’t stay. We/ fly ‘way, I don’t think the swans are mocking Yeats, but are simply reminding him of reality. The sentence, “We/scorn Yeats”, I don’t think the swans are “ridiculing” Yeats, but are acknowledging Yeats’ feelings.