Parker, Dorothy | Arthur F. Kinney (essay date 1998)
Arthur F. Kinney (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “Her Apprenticeship: Essays, Light Verse, Drama,” in Dorothy Parker, Revised, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998, pp. 66-72.
[Here, Kinney provides a discussion concerning Parker's use of meter and verbal simplicity to better satirize her view of society.]
LIGHT VERSE: “COUNTING UP, EXULTINGLY”
When the wry, regular, and apparently easy poems of Parker were selected for her first book in 1926, she had been writing and publishing short verses for more than 11 years. Parker was determined from the start to write satire from her woman's point of view—to exaggerate reality through stereotype, repetition, cataloguing, or hyperbole—rather than to write nonsense verse. She also wanted her verse to be simple, as colloquial as possible, for that way she could extend her satire to those who spoke as her lines speak—but she found, even composing longhand (later, with...
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