Criticism and Correction: Satire and Praise in Dryden, Pope, and Beyond Anonymous College

‘The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction. And he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender, than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease’

Satire is a difficult, protean genre and one that avoids rather than invites classification. John Dryden’s preface to Absalom and Achitophel is appealing, as by uniting ‘satire’ under one common cause, his allegory offers a solution to this difficulty. Satire thus becomes a process of punishment and reward that serves as a remedy for social correction. Samuel Johnson famously describes the genre as ‘a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.’ This notion of censorship correlates with Dryden; satire becomes a judicial mode in which the boundaries between right and wrong are clear and vice is brought to light. As Dustin Griffin points out in Satire: a Critical Reintroduction, a view of satire as a genre in which ‘The satirist …is quite certain of his own moral position’ (p35) dominates ‘conventional satirist theory’; particularly within the writing of those theorists who published their works around the 1960s. In Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, satire becomes a sphere in which ‘…moral norms are...