Dryden's: Mac Flecknoe
Mac Flecknoe is a satiric poem of 217 lines, written in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter). The poem has been commonly judged as the best short satiric poem in the English language. In it, John Dryden seeks to ridicule Thomas Shadwell, a well-known playwright and indifferent poet, by placing him in an incredible and wholly invented fictional world. He is portrayed as “Mac” (or the son of) Flecknoe—Richard Flecknoe having been an even less accomplished poet than Shadwell.
The poem traces its "hero's rise (Shadewell) to stupidity in verse deliberately mimicking the style of and alluding to Virgil's Aeneid and other epics. Like the Odyssey, it starts in a kind of Olympus, only it's the realm ( Kingdom) of Nonsense, until recently ruled by Flecknoe. The dying king of dullness searches for a successor and, by virtue of his vices (as it were) Mac Flecknoe (Shadwell) gets selected for the throne. The rest of the poem develops by a pattern of mock praise of poetic vices wherein "success" is failure and the slightest deviation from the stupid norm is a clear sign that somebody's got poetic talent. Dryden does not use belittling techniques to satirize Shadwell. He keeps to his mock heroic style.
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