

Battle Of The Books Essay

849 words - 4 pages

Write an analysis of the fable of the spider and the bee in Swift’s The Battle of the Books. What does the insect stand for?

The Battle of the Books is a simple mock-heroic story of a battle among the books reposing in the King’s Library at St. James’s palace. The battle itself is a satirical allegory on an intellectual debate that had been raging in England, sometimes called Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. In theory, this debate concerned the relative value of the intellectual accomplishments of the antiquity, as compared to the advancement that had been made in many fields of human knowledge since the Renaissance.
The Battle of the Books has become a term for the quarrel of the ...view middle of the document...

The spider claims that the bee is useless, because he has no property of his own. The bee counters, saying that the spider’s web consists only of dirt and that all he really owns is poison. This fable is an allegory for the battle in the library. This fable is an interruption of the argue and we expect the fable to give us the answer of the question who wins the battle. But it is another example of each side’s arguments. But the argue is very deep and here it is not shown which side win the field. It is very hard to tell which works are better even though that the fable tells us that all that we have to know” can be found in Virgil, Cicero, Homer and especially in Aristotle”. We can tell that they are the fathers of literary world.
It consist and other two metaphors for the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns-the metaphor s in a William Temple’s essay. He says that the moderns are “dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants”. He also sees the modern writers as a “reflected light, while the ancients were sources of light: they possess a clear view of nature, and modern man only reflects their vision.” These metaphors attack the moderns, saying that they create their works which are based on the existing works of the ancient authors. They build over the already existing foundation. These metaphors tell us that the modern authors...

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