Poets have always attracted the parodist and they account for a fair number of the works included in this collection. Wordsworth, partly because of his vast and uneven output, has long been a favourite target. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most effective attempts at capturing his manner and his weaknesses was written by Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765-1834), a literary lady five years senior than Wordsworth. Her Wordsworthian lines, Gross comments, have an idyllic quality, which is "somehow all the more idyllic for being comic". The parody of Byron which he includes is taken from Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Nightmare Abbey and draws from Gross the comment that the lines are "almost too good for Peacock's parodic purpose": an interesting hazard of which few satirists are in danger. Peacock's brilliance is evident also in another extract from the same novel, in which Coleridge appears as "Mr Flosky", a middle-aged philosopher whose table talk consists of impenetrable torrents of metaphysical verbiage, unsparingly parodied.

If Peacock is thought to be rather cruelly ridiculing Coleridge in that caricature, ruthlessness can be an important part of good parody, as this collection illustrates. One danger with a really successful piece of mockery is that of sailing too close to the wind. This parodist's mishap happened to the once-popular novelist Robert Hichens when he wrote The Green Carnation. This was a clever lampoon of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, under the names of Esme Amaranth and Lord Reggie. It contained hints, by no means obscure, about the two men's private lives. It was published in 1894 and ran into trouble only few months later when the legal proceedings that were to destroy Wilde began. The book had to be withdrawn, caricature having for once moved too close to the truth.