Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/108



PARODIES.

NOTHER peculiar sign of the wide influence exercised by The Raven is the number of parodies and imitations it has given rise to: whilst many of these are beneath contempt some of them, for various reasons, are worthy of notice and even of preservation. The first of these, probably, in point of time if not of merit, is The Gazelle, by Philip P. Cooke, a young Virginian poet, who died just as he was giving promise of future fame. His beautiful lyric of Florence Vane had attracted the notice of Poe, who cited it and praised it highly, in his lectures on "The Poets and Poetry of America." The Gazelle might almost be regarded as a response to the elder poet's generous notice. Poe himself observes, that this parody "although professedly an imitation, has a very great deal of original power," and he published it in the New York Evening Mirror (April 29th, 1845), with the remark that "the following, from our new-found boy poet of fifteen years of age, shows a most happy faculty of imitation"—