"Poor Poll" is a poem written by Robert Bridges in 1921 and first collected in his book New Verse (1925).
Bridges composed "Poor Poll" at the same time that T. S. Eliot was writing The Waste Land.
[1] Both Eliot and Bridges were searching[citation needed] for a medium which would allow the incorporation of a wide variety of material, including phrases in foreign languages.
Bridges wrote in a later essay, "It was partly this wish for liberty to use various tongues that made me address my first experiment to a parrot, but partly also my wish to discover how a low setting of scene and diction would stand; because one of the main limitations of English verse is that its accentual (dot and go one) bumping is apt to make ordinary words ridiculous"[2] Some scholars have suggested[3] that in the poem (dated "June 3, 1921"), Bridges consciously parodied Eliot's Waste Land (first published in October 1922).
Bridges' footnotes are headed "Metrical Elucidations", and offer advice on the poem's scansion as well as explaining some of the allusions.