Theory and Context of the Didactic Poem: Some Classical, Mediaeval, and Later Continuities

Abstract

"The ancients have left us no rules or observations concerning this species of poetry," begins Joseph Warton's "Reflections on Didactic Poetry," which he appended to his translation of Virgil's Georgies in 1753. By the time Warton was writing, England had entered a new age of scientific thought and was witnessing both a remarkable burgeoning of scientific poetry and a corresponding interest in the genre by literary theorists. It was, of course, to the classical Didactic poets -- Hesiod, Aratus, Lucretius, Virgil, Manilius, and others — that the neo-classical poets turned for models. As for critics like Addison and Warton, they too had to rely on the practice of classical poets in order to discover the "rules” for the Didactic genre, since there was no well-defined body of critical canons on it. No Poetics devoted to the Lehrgedicht has emerged from the sands of Egypt or the ashes of Herculaneum, nor is likely to. But ancient critics are more forthcoming on the general question of the relationship between poetry and truth, which is a central issue for Didactic poetry. Occasionally, too, these critics make judgments about particular practitioners of Didactic, and so reveal their opinion of the nature of such poetry. One purpose of this essay is to piece together the evidence of these clues. It will also be instructive to study, if only cursorily, some of the more general cultural attitudes — about education, about science, about literature — which implicitly fostered the writing of this kind of poetry.