Word Finder - satires

definition

A literary device of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Humor, irony, and exaggeration are often used to aid this.

definition

A satirical work.

example

a stinging satire of American politics.

definition

Severity of remark.

In itself a product of the medieval conception of the fool who figured so largely in the Shrovetide and other pageants, it differs entirely from the general allegorical satires of the preceding centuries.

Parliament, which he had kept at arm's length, was hostile; he was hated by the nobility, and his general unpopularity is reflected in Skelton's satires and in Hall's Chronicle.

Garnet's Ghost was published as a broadside in 1679, but the other Satires on the Jesuits, although written at the same time, were not printed until 1681.

He was original in the dramatic setting provided for his satires.

Oldham wrote other satires, notably one "addressed to a friend about to leave the university," which contains a well-known description of the state of slavery of the private chaplain, and another "dissuading from poetry," describing the ingratitude shown to Edmund Spenser, whose ghost is the speaker, to Samuel Butler and to Abraham Cowley.

This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy.

Much of the wisdom of Maecenas probably lives in the Satires and Epistles of Horace.

But Nef'i could revile as well as praise, and such was the bitterness of some of his satires that certain influential personages who came under his lash induced Murad IV.

During the next two years he published five shorter satires, all of which were well received by the public. The great event of 1721 was the erection of the first Danish theatre in GrOnnegade, Copenhagen; Holberg took the direction of this house, in which was played, in September 1722, a Danish translation of L'Avare.

He makes no claim to the creative exuberance of Plautus, but he is entirely free from his extravagance and mannerisms. The superiority of his style over that of Lucilius, who wrote his satires a generation later, is immeasurable.

Horace, so depreciatory in general of the older literature, shows his appreciation of Terence by the frequent reproduction in his Satires and Odes of his language and his philosophy of life.

The smartest epigrams, the fairest similes, the keenest satires, spoken or sung on such occasions, were treasured in the memory of the hearers and carried by them to their homes.

C. aandberg's Primeurs arabes, 1, aeiden, 1886), and Jarwal ibn Aus, known as al-IIutai`a, a wandering poet whose keen satires led to his imprisonment by Omar (Poems, ed.

His satires were so effective that he is said to have crushed forty-three rivals.

For about thirty years the most important event in Roman literature was the production of the satires of Lucilius, in which the politics, morals, society and letters of the time were criticized with the utmost freedom and pungency, and his own personality was brought immediately and familiarly before his contemporaries.

The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to 80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism.

The first - extending from about 40 to 29 - is that of the Epodes and Satires.

Personality is the essence of his Epodes; in the Satires it is used merely as illustrative of general tendencies.

In the Satires we find realistic pictures of social life, and the conduct and opinions of the world submitted to the standard of good feeling and common sense.

The style of the Epodes is pointed and epigrammatic, that of the Satires natural and familiar.

The six short Satires of Persius (34-62) are the purest product of Stoicism - a Stoicism that had found in a contemporary, Thrasea, a more rational and practical hero than Cato.

Their influence is also to be traced in the satires of Persius.

The statement of Porphyrion, the old commentator on Horace, that Florus himself wrote satires, is probably erroneous, but he may have edited selections from the earlier satirists (Ennius, Lucilius, Varro).

We learn from Horace that he lived on the most intimate terms of friendship with Scipio and Laelius, and that he celebrated the exploits and virtues of the former in his satires.

Fragments of those books of his satires which seem to have been first given to the world (books xxvi.-xxix.) clearly indicate that they were written in the lifetime of Scipio.

He left behind him thirty books of satires, and there is reason to believe that each book, like the books of Horace and Juvenal, was composed of different pieces.

Most of the satires of Lucilius were written in hexameters, but, so far as an opinion can be formed from a number of unconnected fragments, he seems to have written the trochaic tetrameter with a smoothness, clearness and simplicity which he never attained in handling the hexameter.

For students of Latin literature, the chief interest of studying the fragments of Lucilius consists in the light which they throw on the aims and methods of Horace in the composition of his satires, and, though not to the same extent, of his epistles.

His curious encyclopaedic work, entitled Satyricon, or De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem, is an elaborate allegory in nine books, written in a mixture of prose and verse, after the manner of the Menippean satires of Varro.

Moreover, in the fascinating collection of popular satires and ephemeral pamphlets made by Schade, one is constantly impressed with the absence of religious fervour, and the highly secular nature of the matters discussed.

Johann Reuchlin, a well-known scholar, who had been charged by the Dominicans with heresy, not only received the support of the newer type of scholars, who wrote him encouraging letters which he published under the title Epistolae clarorum virorum, but this collection suggested to Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten one of the most successful satires of the ages, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum.

There is not a trace of human kindness in his satires, which were directed against the corruption of the times, the Reformation, and especially against Luther.

Cassius is credited with satires, elegies, epigrams and tragedies.

In fact most styles of composition were attempted by him - of course satires and fables among the number.

The picture of Mistress Blagge's saintly life at court is heightened in interest when read in connexion with the scandalous memoirs of the comte de Gramont, or contemporary political satires on the court.

Karman also wrote two satires and fragments of an historical novel, while his literary programme is set forth in his dissertation Anemzet csinosoddsa.

This is especially seen in his satires on Arabs (which made him so hated that no man followed his bier when he died).

Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were by many readers thought superior to the originals.

He wrote rude, coarse satires, crude verse, and compositions on the American government, temperance, &c. At the age of seventeen he had attained his full height, and began to be known as a wrestler, runner and lifter of great weights.

Christian Falster (1690-1752) wrote satires of some merit, but most of his work is in Latin.

He contributed to the Rolliad and the Probationary Odes political satires directed against Pitt's administration.

Some twelve martyrs at least perished in 1539-1540, and George Buchanan, whose satires on the Franciscans delighted the king, escaped to France, in circumstances which he described diversely on different occasions, as was his habit.

In philology he wrote Encyclopaedia philologica sive primae lineae Isagoges in antiquorum stadia (1798; 2nd ed., 1805); Kurze Theorie des lateinischen Stils (1793); Leitfaden der Rhetorik (1802); and an annotated edition of the Satires of Persius.

A lighter vein is to be observed in various dramatic satires written at this time, such as Cotter, Helden and Wieland (1774), Hanswursts Hochzeit, Fastnachtsspiel vorn Pater Brey, Satyros, and in the Singspiele, Erwin and Elmire (1775) and Claudine von Villa Bella (1776); while in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger (1772- 1773), Goethe drove home the principles of the new movement of Sturm and Drang in terse and pointed criticism.

Besides pamphlets on the Catholic and slavery questions, as well as several fugitive jeux d'esprit, and a number of unsigned articles in the Analytical Review, Geddes also published a free metrical version of Select Satires of Horace (1779), and a verbal rendering of the First Book of the Iliad of Homer (1792).

His songs, his satires, his occasional pieces, without displaying any real originality, show Dalin's tact and skill as a workman with the pen.

He wrote fables, allegories, satires, and a successful comedy of manners, The Swedish Fop. He outlived his chief contemporaries so long that the new generation addressed him as " Father Gyllenborg."

Later satires in an epistolary form are Pascal's Provincial Letters, Swift's Drapier Letters, and the Letters of Junius.

But the lines originally written on Paris, having been inserted in one of his new satires, excited the jealous anger of an actor of the time, who was a favourite of the emperor, and procured the poet's banishment under the form of a military appointment to the extremity of Egypt.

Some of these statements are so much in consonance with the indirect evidence afforded by the satires that they may be a series of conjectures based upon them.