Debate Poetry
Neil Cartlidge
The term debate‐poetry is conventionally used to describe a diverse group of medieval texts dramatizing imagined opposition between different speakers, often personifications animals or birds, moral qualities, social classes, aspects human nature. Such poems this type are relatively prominent in literature. Together with related forms like the parliament, dream‐vision and prose‐dialogue, they testify important part played by argument debate culture.
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain