It has sometimes been suggested that poetry is too pure or unworldly an art to engage in politics. Nevertheless, whether writing scurrilous doggerel, more elaborate satirical essays on human folly, or works of dignified and elegiac protest, poets have long intervened in public life. Much of the verse dashed off to land blows in debate is of negligible literary merit, but the compassion which can underlie strong political feeling has occasionally given rise to major works. The thousands of metrical squibs printed in the furtherance of factional party wrangling show that verse has been seen as an effective weapon by its practitioners, and in some societies the very act of writing poetry has assumed a political dimension, as a form of dissent from state control.