SOURCE: “Satire,” The Criterion, Vol. 9, No. XXXIV, October, 1929, pp. 7-22.

In the following essay, Wolfe lays out the task of the satirist, asserts that he seeks not only judgment but condemnation, and contrasts satire with the lampoon, parody, burlesque, and allegory.

The satirist holds a place half-way between the preacher and the wit. He has the purpose of the first and uses the weapons of the second. He must both hate and love. For what impels him to write is not less the hatred of wrong and injustice than a love of the right and just. So much he shares with the prophet. But he seeks to affect the minds of men not by the congruities of virtue, but by the incongruities of vice, and in that he partakes of the wit. For as laughter dispels care by showing that as one thing is, so all may be...