The debates are necessarily emotionally charged, highlighting the contrasting values and personalities of the participants, and exposing their essentially opposite natures.
On the surface, debate poems typically appear didactic, but under this often lies a genuine dialogue between two equally paired opponents.
They featured prominently in the Arabic works of the Abbasid-era belletrist al-Jahiz, who wryly pitted the belly against the back, young male lovers against women, and blacks against whites, and continued in later medieval Islamic Persian literature.
The first example we have of the form is Conflictus Veris et Hiemis (Contention of Spring and Winter), which was written in the late eighth century and is commonly attributed to Alcuin.
The idea was that every thing – whether it be concrete, abstract, alive or inanimate – had a natural and logical opposite, and this conception was only bolstered by the religious language being used by the Catholic Church at the time.
Additionally, this conception was bolstered by the presence of overt dichotomies in the natural world, such as night and day, summer and winter, sea and land, male and female, sun and moon, youth and old age.
Virgil's Eclogues features two shepherds engaging in "a game of wit",[6] and this may be an early form of the debate poems of later centuries.
[1] Two well-known works in which the animals carry on intellectual debates are The Owl and the Nightingale (13th century), involving a dispute between two birds quarreling over who is more useful to man, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (1382?).
This poem also continues the theme of moral dispute by featuring a cuckoo, symbol of female infidelity, debating the nightingale over love.
[7] This explanation can be associated with the scholar’s previous assertion on the traces of Medieval culture in shaping the Middle English debate poetry tradition since these poems not only cover many social issues but also how they are received and transmitted in literature.
For example, both employ the medieval rhetorical tools of appealing to authority (by quoting Alfred the Great) and by attempting to goad the opponent into anger and then a mistake (stultiloquiem).