One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs no label, and until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors: his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.
“My dear Sir:” he is made to write in response to an imaginary request for a contribution, “to be obliged to penetrate with the pump-buckets of necessity, prompted by the piston of a fifty-dollar compensation, with a publisher as the pump-handle, in search of a poem, is, of itself, annoying enough. To draw one up with the rope and bucket of gratuity, is a labor which qualifies one for a long residence in fatiguedom. Your letter found me fagging away over my work-desk—chasing a brilliant idea in and out of the myriads of convolutions of my brain. All the while that I was aping Prometheus (the window being half-opened), I could sniff the delightful odors of a rose which a fair neighbor will insist on keeping,” etc., etc.
The requested poem is annexed—a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”—
“Night on the market. Through the colonnade
Of red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,
Save of some whistling urchin as he strode
With stamping footfalls, listening to the noise
Which wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;
Or the low mutter of the drunken man,