SOURCE: Gardner, John. “The Owl and the Nightingale: A Burlesque.” Papers on Language and Literature 2, no. 1 (winter 1966): 3-12.

In the following essay, Gardner views The Owl and the Nightingale as principally a comic, rather than an allegorical, poem that depicts a fundamental desire on the part of its main figures to win their debate rather than to discover truth.

Though few critics would deny that The Owl and the Nightingale has comic passages, no one has pointed out in print that the whole poem is a comic burlesque, didactic only insofar as comedy is intrinsically didactic.¹ It is of course hard to talk about humor: one is likely to end up tediously explaining jokes. Perhaps for this reason, discussion of the poem has generally focused on two problems which at first glance seem more manageable: analysis of the opposing positions dramatized in the poem (What do the Owl...