Bakhtin's concept of the carnival — the temporary inversion of hierarchy, the licensed transgression of social norms, the celebration of the grotesque body — has been applied to comic and satirical poetry, from Aristophanes to Burns's "Holy Willie's Prayer," where carnivalesque laughter subverts authority; The tradition of the mock-heroic poem (Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe") deploys carnival philosophy — the comic inversion of high and low, heroic and trivial — to produce critique through laughter; A contemporary poet writing about street festivals, Mardi Gras, or Carnival might use Bakhtin's philosophy to argue that these events are not merely entertainment but philosophically significant disruptions of the social order that reveal its contingency; Dylan Thomas's exuberant, excess-laden poetry has a carnivalesque quality — the excess of sound, imagery, and emotion overflows the boundaries of decorous lyric and enacts a philosophical celebration of bodily and linguistic abundance; Rochester and other Restoration libertine poets use carnival philosophy — the suspension of moral norms in favor of appetite and pleasure — to interrogate Puritan asceticism and argue for a philosophical hedonism; Shakespeare's festive comedies, with their inversions of gender and social hierarchy, enact carnival philosophy in dramatic form, and poets writing about festivity and misrule draw on this tradition to argue that play is a serious philosophical act