The Pattern of Formal Verse Satire in the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”