Satirical Poetry

6 Key excerpts on "Satirical Poetry"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  A Companion to Satire

  Ancient and Modern

  • Ruben Quintero(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  From the very beginning, no genre has been more narrowly defined or more broadly practiced. On the one hand, most of us will concur with Samuel Johnson’s well-known definition that a satire is ‘‘a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.’’ On the other hand, we are well aware that this definition covers only a fraction of the great satires of our literary tradition. Horace’s satires, for instance, comprehend not only examinations of vice and stupidity, but also literary essays, dialogues on ethics, and sketches of Roman social life. Moreover, as scholars have long noted, it is not always easy to distinguish conventional satires – poems that embody traditional features of the genre in particular and obvious ways – from poems that are more generally infused with a satirical spirit. For my part, I shall treat the genre liberally. I shall include, under the satirical rubric, not simply poems that excoriate foolishness and evil, but also those wider-ranging essayistic medleys that explore, in the manner of Horace and the great Renaissance satirists, various topics of interest to intelligent women and men. I should also make a preliminary point about satirical lyrics and satirical epigrams. Though twentieth-century satirists write these more often than their predecessors did, such poems also appear in earlier periods. If we do not always appreciate these earlier efforts or recognize their satirical character, it is because they are overshadowed by the larger satires of their day or of their authors. For example, Walter Ralegh’s ‘‘The Lie’’ 436 Timothy Steele is one of the greatest of all English satirical short poems, but it appears in neither The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (Grigson 1980) nor The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse (Lucie-Smith 1967). Its omission is, however, understandable when one con-siders that the editors, in selecting material from the Renaissance, necessarily focused on the major satirical works of Wyatt, Donne, and Jonson.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  Available until 7 Feb |Learn more

  The Language of Persuasion in Politics

  An Introduction

  • Alan Partington, Charlotte Taylor(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Taylor (2016) notes that sarcasm is not always judged to be a bad thing. She observed how participants in online forums sometimes referred to their own behaviour as ‘sarcastic’ and portrayed it as a justifiable response to some other person’s aggressive verbal behaviour towards them. Politicians too may pride themselves on their ability to display aggression in a way that is considered both acceptable and entertaining.

  It may also be viewed as entertaining by those who are not the target, as in the following instance from the UK House of Lords:

  I have to thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, for his colourful combination of irony and sarcasm, which I so often enjoyed listening to when he was a Member in another place.

  (House of Lords 2003)

  9.3 Definitions of satire

  Humour in politics is often associated with satire: Satire is a work ‘in which wickedness or folly is censured’ (Johnson 1755). It is a written or spoken form ‘in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony or other methods’ (Encyclopedia Britannica, www­.br­ita­nni­ca.­com­/ar­t/s­ati­re ). Various mock satirical ‘newspapers’ or news TV are available online; for example, The Onion satirises current affairs from a US perspective, The Daily Mash and NewsThump from a UK angle.

  In the terms adopted in this book, satire is also a means of persuasion. A person, behaviour or state of affairs is criticised (evaluated unfavourably) in the hope of persuading an audience that something has to change.

  Moreover:

  • In political satire, individuals or groups who possess power, authority or at least influence

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

  • S. Kivistö(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This did not mean merely alteration of the emotions but also the gaining of cognition. In practice, satires evoked very different emotions. For example, in Heinsius’s time Calvinist preachers took a strict stand against poetry (and theatre in particular) in the Netherlands as well as in England, France and Switzerland (Meter 1984, pp. 36–7). Satire was even more difficult to take than other forms of poetry because it described vices and used dirty words. The contemporary religious atmosphere was one big reason for writers like Heinsius to provide a moral justification of the art of satire and other genres. Obscene passages and words that else- where aroused indignation towards the speaker were justified as being useful in censuring the sinful target and as a means of moral instruc- tion. Rigault (1684) mentioned that anatomical terms, words pointing to intimate body parts and their functions (such as the vulva or urinary bladder) were essential to satirical criticism and its parrhesia. Satirists had a special licence to use words related to defecation, urination and the genitals; these were part of the genre’s purifying equipment. Not all authors of poetics agreed, however. For example, Giovanni Antonio Viperano (1535–1610), a Sicilian historian and humanist, wrote in his De poetica libri tres (1579) that “the satiric poet ought especially to avoid 54 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire all filthy subjects and words, lest attempting to purge minds of dirt, he contaminate them with even fouler blemishes” (1987, p. 141; trans. Philip Rollinson). He advised that satire should maintain purity and elegance in diction. 30 Likewise, Pontanus cautioned that “satirical jokes and wit should do without thematic and verbal obscenity; instead they should censure crimes and desires so that while purging the minds of the guilty, they would not at the same time induce ugliness of manners into sincere and innocent minds” (1594, p. 172).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Parody and Pedagogy in the Age of Neoliberalism

  • Michael Lucas(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  In only focusing on highly abstract theories of irony provided by (mostly) serious philosophers, scholars (but not me) rely too heavily on specialized readings to disrupt peoples’ problematic assumptions. With parody, the buy-in for our perceptions to be challenged is much less. We do not have to learn an overly-specialized academic language in order to participate in the philos- ophizing and self-reflection that parody can provide—we only need a basic understanding of social norms and communicative practices in order to view humor within the performance and to be offered alternative viewpoints. As mentioned throughout this text, this is not merely a call to abandon spe- cialized audiences or rigorous scholarship and texts in favor of a generalized “dumbing down.” 9 Instead, it is an exploration into alternative approaches that can improve every aspect of our quests for knowledge, how we communi- cate our findings, and how we teach others about what we have found. Differentiating Parody from Other Comedic Forms Obviously there are more comedic rhetorical devices than parody, satire, and irony, for example, the burlesque, ridicule, mock-epic, and travesty. However, these forms are problematic when they communicate an overly simplistic understanding of culture, power relations, and their target. These forms share similar aspects with parody but fail to be as helpful, as each one lacks essential elements that make parody more robust. This is one of the reasons why Rose distinguishes parody from Bakhtin’s definitions of parody that trap the term within the realm of folk humor, thereby placing too strong an emphasis on parody’s ridiculing aspects (158). Here, it becomes necessary to distinguish parody from these closely related forms because folk humor, burlesque, pure ridicule, mock-epic, and travesty often depend on overly-simplified treat- ments of power relations; i.e., a mere reversal of high and low culture (Rose 29).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Satire

  A Critical Reintroduction

  • Dustin Griffin(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  In the late fourth century the grammarian Diomedes defined satire as “a verse composition . . . defamatory and composed to carp at human vices” (maledicum et ad carpenda hominum vitia). 14 Furthermore, he has in mind only the tradition of Roman verse satire as written by Lucilius, Horace, and Persius (whom he names), omitting the Varronian or Menippean tradition altogether. Though he acknowledges satire’s complex etymology, from satyrs or the lanx satura or the lex satura, 15 Diomedes defines the form in wholly moral terms. He says nothing of wit, humor, playfulness, exaggeration or fantasy or paradox, iconoclasm or the carnival spirit. It is ultimately writers like Diomedes, reflecting what G.L. Hendrickson called the “moral obsession of literary criticism in later antiquity,” 16 who lead more or less directly to the emphasis on satire’s moral function that dominates satiric theory from the Renaissance into the mid-twentieth century. Elizabethan Theory Sixteenth-century English writers on satire inherited several different traditions: a broad medieval tradition of “complaint” 17 that ranged in English alone from Langland and Chaucer to Barclay and Skelton; Lucianic dialogues, once prized for their sophistication but by the Reformation increasingly associated with scoffing atheism; a line of epistolary satire in Italy from Vingiguerra to Alamanni and Ariosto, based primarily on Horatian models. Oddly enough, with all this wealth of living tradition and despite the recovery of classical Roman formal satire, the dominant theory of satire among Renaissance writers was based on their notion of Greek satyr plays (of which they knew almost nothing), a theory that could account for very little of the satire with which they were familiar

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Modernism, Satire and the Novel

  • Jonathan Greenberg(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  15 This moral element separates satire from pure comedy; the objects of satiric laughter are experienced not as trivial but as “harmful or destructive.” 16 It also tends to make satire a conservative mode, the argument runs, since satire paints its target as deviating from a strong and stable set of communally held beliefs and at least implicitly urges reform. Such “conservatism,” suggesting both a certainty of authorial meaning and a promotion of social consensus, resembles what Wayne Booth has called “stable irony”; irony is stable, according to Booth, if “once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions.” 17 This conservatism describes something different from a writer’s overt political views; while in a case such as Evelyn Waugh’s the writer’s outspoken traditionalism appears to reinforce his satiric ridicule of all that departs from age-old standards, a novelist on the left like Nathanael West has just as frequently been read as conservative in the sense that, in his biographer’s words, “his satire was designed to return man to himself, to his ‘lawful callings’.” 18 Thus, while satire is sometimes thought to trade in politics to the fault of being trivial – does anyone really care that the Treasurer of Lilliput was meant to represent Robert Walpole? – it is equally often felt to be redeemed by a metaphysical insight into that chimerical entity called human nature. 19 Yet even if in satire the timely ultimately gives way to the timeless, political carping to moral vision, unadulterated moralism does not, according to the typologists, produce satire, but leads instead to sermon, invective, or The double movement of satire 3 polemic. To achieve its moral aims, satire has been understood to deploy techniques that involve wit, play, and fantasy.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book