Mock as screen and optic

As its unique approach to the question of generational differences, this essay takes the relationship looks at poetry and modernity; that is, what happens when a style [such as the mock heroic, or the poetically inflated] starts to feel its age, yet doesn't die; and how its readers cope with its resurrections. Moving nimbly from Nigel Slater to Alexander Pope and back, the essay abandons the usual and reduced conception of 'mock' ‐ that it describes trivial happenings but in an elevated language ‐ and instead looks for a better conception, suggesting instead that mock is ubiquitous, both in literature and the everyday, as a broad and all‐pervasive style of thinking and feeling.