Eustache Deschamps, the fourteenth- century French courtly love poet, disliked mustard. One of his finest lyrics records his misery on running into it everywhere, in Bruges, Antwerp, Ostend and Ghent, and in whatever he ordered— mutton, boar, pigeon, rabbit, mussels— and always unasked. If he was forced to compromise his idea of bearable cuisine by eating it anyway, at least he could retaliate in verse. A number of his best poems contain denunciations of mustard, and quite a few of life's other petty annoyances.

Deschamps's recognition that poetry might be used as an instrument of jesting, biting retaliation also flashes through Ovid's first- century curse poem Ibis. In it the exiled poet aims over six hundred lines of snickering invective at the high Roman official, probably Augustus, who had banished him to an obscure imperial outpost at Tomis, presumably for his unfashionable decadence and irreverence.

Ovid piles on his curses in line after line, urging the gods to shove his tormentor off a cliff, into a fire, into boiling oil, into the sea, into a cauldron. While he may not be the first poet to turn cursing into an art (the literary art of divine denunciation must be at least as old as the ancient Egyptians, who liked to browbeat their gods into what they hoped would be acts of horrid vengeance), he may be the first to elevate it into one of the fine arts. Irony, paradox and a knack for seizing on the apt humiliation (“mayst thou, sewed in a bullock's hide, be basely carried as booty to thy lord”) lift his bitterness to gloomy heights. His voluptuous torrent of abuse even allows him to rise above mere petulance into an objective, grisly triumph. A strange, growled rapture materializes when at the end his curses are transformed by their sheer extravagance into a tacit acknowledgment of some sort of celestial justice, or injustice.

Pope, Swift and Heine follow in Ovid and Deschamps's never boring wake, which becomes part of the grand satirical tradition. Their success lies in a viperous wit that bedevils as it blandishes the savageries of the stupid, unfair and vicious. A bitter glory emerges from its mix of intimacy and insolence. It offers what becomes a volcanic harrumph that refuses to suffer fools gladly, along with the special pleasure for the reader of watching well- deserved punishments tartly administered.