Charles Stuart Calverley is one of the best-known, and one of the best, practitioners of the Victorian art of light verse. He wrote almost no obviously serious poetry but instead applied his virtuosity as a verse craftsman to classical translation, to lighthearted humorous writing, and to incisive parodies of such famous contemporaries as Browning, Tennyson, and D.G. Rossetti. He is an outstanding parodist in that he moves beyond the broad mockery of earlier parodists to a much more pointed and subtle imitative mockery of style and meter, and in this he set the pattern for such later Victorian parodists as J.K. Stephen. Calverley's verse also has a historical significance, beyond the specialized tradition of parody, because its formalism is a symptom of the increasing reservations many educated later Victorians felt about the innovative stylistic individuality of the great early Victorian poets.

Calverley was born Charles Stuart...