What is satire? Always a difficult question to answer, the nature of satire perplexes people with an urge to pin things down. Satire might be called a stance, an attitude, which indicates from the start that one isn't always in that state of mind, but assumes it from time to time. It tends to be an attitude of the young and clever. An attitude to what? To what the young and clever person sees around him, that is to say, society, the behavior of others. The satirist is the polar opposite of the lyricist, especially one who writes devotional lyrics, in a private engagement with the absolute. Satire is a public engagement with the times; a critical engagement; sometimes a hostile and contemptuous one. It is a stance that can take a number of different literary forms - a play, a novel, an epigram. When we say ''a satire,'' however, we mean a ''formal verse satire,'' that is to say, a poem modeled to some degree on the Roman satirists, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius.