The very qualities that attract us in the works of certain poets are often the very qualities most liable to ridicule.We get to like certain exaggerated tones and idiosyncratic tics and even come to savor them, quite apart from the beauty of the verse. Whitman wouldn’t be Whitman without his goofy yawp, nor would Eliot be Eliot without his hovering and sepulchral litanies. We know their unmistakable voices by such excesses of effect. And we appreciate them as we do the foibles of friends whom we cherish all the more for their eccentricities.

Hartley Coleridge certainly felt this for Wordsworth, once the closest friend of his father. Wordsworth can be sublime, but too often a small gummy residue of self-regard lies at the heart of his most moving lyrics. Take his famous — and quite beautiful — “Lucy” poems. All we really learn about Lucy is that she lived “amidst the untrodden ways.” In lamenting her death, Wordsworth exclaims, “And O the difference to me!” I suspect the difference was greater for poor Lucy. Coleridge parodied this in “Wordsworth Unvisited,” which begins “He lived amidst th’untrodden ways” and concludes:

Unread his words — his “Milk White Doe”
With dust is dark and dim;
It’s still in Longman’s shop, and oh!
The difference to him!

This is unsparing but not mean-spirited; we tend to parody those works we care about. I suspect that such sly affection lies behind the brilliant parodies of the English poet Wendy Cope. She has perfect pitch in echoing the absurdities of a style. And she takes wicked delight in letting the hot air out of inflated postures. Here is her take on the twittering tribe, titled “Triolet:”

I used to think all poets were Byronic —
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
And then I met a few. Yes it’s ironic —
I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They’re mostly wicked as a ginless tonic
And wild as pension plans.
Not long ago I used to think all poets were Byronic —
Mad, bad and dangerous to know .

Ms. Cope has what might be termed an affectionate abhorrence of pretension. She likes nothing better than to construct a poem out of some pompous utterance an unwitting bard has been careless enough to drop. In “A Policeman’s Lot,” she fashions a dance-hall ditty out of the late poet laureate Ted Hughes’s portentous remark, “The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.” Her poem begins:

Oh, once I was a policeman young and merry (young and merry), Controlling crowds and fighting petty crime (petty crime), But now I work on matters literary (litererry) And I am growing old before my time (‘fore my time). No, the imagination of a writer (of a writer) Is not the sort of beat a chap would choose (chap would choose) And they’ve assigned me a prolific blighter (‘lific blighter) — Patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes.

Ms. Cope is the author of four collections of verse, the most famous of which is probably the first, titled “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis,” which appeared in 1986. She enjoys an unusual appeal for a contemporary poet; she is read by the fabled “ordinary reader” as well as by fellow poets who admire her wit and skill. Much of her poetry resembles “light verse,” and at first blush she seems to be a kind of English Dorothy Parker, but in fact, she uses the conventions of light verse — tight forms, elegant rhyme schemes, well-timed punch lines — for deeper purposes.

The peacock struts and brandishes his tail; the pea hen pretends not to notice. Ms. Cope is a bit like the pea hen. She’s secretly impressed by that effulgence of display, but she knows what it’s worth. She sees the unsightly feet beneath the feathered glitter. The pretensions of the male of the species inspire her satirical eye, but she acknowledges the contradictions of desire as well, in language as well as in life. Sometimes the two coalesce, as in her outrageous revisions of Shakespeare. His Sonnet 116 famously begins, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments,” but in Ms. Cope’s updating this becomes:

Let me not to the marriage of true swine
Admit impediments. With his big car
He’s won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
I have no spare; henceforth I’ll bear the scar.
Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
And soar above Tulse Hill on poet’s wings —
A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
Outlives their din. One day I’ll make my mark,
Although I’m not from Ulster or from Mars,
And when I’m published in some classy mag
You’ll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.

Not only Shakespeare but Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill, among others, receive their comeuppance in Ms. Cope’s parodies; in each case she catches the inimitable mannerism with exact mimicry. Nor is she any easier on (male) poets in groups, as “Poem Composed in Santa Barbara” (from her 1992 book “Serious Concerns”) shows:

The poets talk. They talk a lot.
They talk of T. S. Eliot.
One is anti. One is pro.
How hard they think! How much they know!
They’re happy. A cicada sings.
We women talk of other things.

This is funny, and true enough, but perhaps a little too easy. The poems work best when a small, almost unintended zaniness intrudes. “Kindness to Animals,” also from “Serious Concerns,” was commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature, which then, not surprisingly, rejected it:

If I went vegetarian
And didn’t eat lambs for dinner,
I think I’d be a better person
And also thinner.
But the lamb is not endangered
And at least I can truthfully say
I have never, ever eaten a barn owl,
So perhaps I am OK.

I once was introduced to Ms. Cope, quite by chance, at some literary get-together and she treated me to a cappuccino at a nearby Starbucks.I kept thinking of that cocoa for Kingsley Amis. I don’t think she’ll be writing a poem about our encounter (there’s no rhyme for “Ormsby”anyway).The poem “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis” is a sendup on literary name-dropping (such as I have just indulged in), as well as a bit of a send-up of Wendy Cope herself.It goes in its entirety like this:

It was a dream I had last week
And some sort of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem
But I love the title.

eormsby@nysun.com