ABSTRACT
These two parodies, ‘A Lyrical Ballad’ and ‘A humble Imitation of some Stanzas written by W. Wordsworth, in Germany, on one of the coldest days of the century’, by the American poet Dr Robert Hutchinson Rose (1776–1842) were first published in the Port Folio 2 , a Philadelphia newspaper edited by Joseph Dennie under the pseudonym ‘Oliver Oldschool’. Published in 1804, they are the first parodies of Wordsworth to appear in America, and even predate most of the most notable imitative critiques produced in his native land. Rose’s writings, preoccupied as they are with Wordsworth’s supposed puerility and inane preoccupation with the commonplace, are typical of the parodic reception granted the poet from the publication of the Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes (1807) until the appearance of The Excursion in 1814. Here, as in early English parodies such as ‘Barham Downs; or Goody Grizzle and her Ass’ 3 and as in early satirical attacks such as the Rev. William Mant’s The Simpliciad; A Satiric-Didactic Poem (1808), the author engages with Wordsworth’s simplicities. Many British parodists, Hogg most notably, writing after the publication of The Excursion, concerned themselves with the epic, metaphysical Wordsworth; Rose, however, devotes his mockery to the ‘Shallow’ Wordsworth.
