For Students
Roman satire is hardly more determinate in its structure than in its style; the poems are so haphazardly organized, so randomly individual, that there seems little justification for speaking of them as a literary kind at all. Beneath the surface complexity of the poems, however, there exists, as one modern scholar has pointed out, a structural principle common to the satires of the Roman poets and their French and English followers. These poems have a bipartite structure: a thesis part, in which some vice or folly is examined critically from many different angles and points of view, and an antithesis ...(100 of 4607 words)