Literary Polemic in Martial


 B. Shelley and John Keats are noted Romantic poets and their works are celebrated. In this article, Percy Bysshe Shelly’s “To a Skylark” and John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” have been appreciated. The skylark and the nightingale seem to be similar birds while reading the poems simultaneously. Shelley glorifies the skylark’s song and Keats immortalizes the nightingale due to its melodious song. The article, structured in four headings- Introduction, Appreciating, The Un-bodied Voices and Conclusion, introduces the poets and their aforesaid poems. It appreciates both the poems in matter of the contrasts and commonalties between the birds, the major themes in the poems, the poets’ power of imagination and the un-bodied voices in the poems. It makes a quest for how the un-bodied voices in the poems represent idealism in contrast to the harsh reality of life. To appreciate the poems and further strengthen the ideas, the poets’ respective poems and books by various writers have been consulted. The article concludes that the songs of the skylark and the nightingale are the un-bodied voices which symbolize beauty, purity, perfection and freedom. These un-bodied voices are in contrast to the harsh reality of human life on the earth.

The main literary genres were formed in the ancient literature. Aristotle in his Poetic identifies three “modes” of narration: epic, lyric and drama, and defines the differences between them. The article deals with one of them, i.e., the ancient lyric, specifically, the epigrammatic poetry. In the title described as “simple” poetry, it may sound odd, ambiguous, but as well intriguing, because it reflects poets and audience’s communication, while the investigator’s perspective provides the opportunity to reason about serious and “other” forms of poetry; the features are better seen in the comparison. The opposition has been discussed by the ancient poets. As an example serves the epigrammatic poetry of Marcus Valerius Martialis, the Roman poet of the 1st century. The poet discusses his object, i.e., epigram, as a form of poetry. He became the example for all the later poetics describing the main features of an ideal epigram. Reading the best examples, it is possible to easily perceive the basic requirements of the epigram: a short form exposure to real life, simple, true-life subject and simple, unsophisticated, even obscene language, and the most important is argutia (the verbal trickery), which creates the wit, which is hidden in the last words of the poem.