Didactic Poetry

Didactic Poetry, that kind of poetry which aims, or seems to aim, at instruction as its object, making pleasure entirely subservient thereto. It has been disputed whether or not the existence of a kind of poetry especially entitled to the name didactic is consistent with the very nature and object of the poetic art. For it is held that, to point out instruction as the peculiar object of one kind of poetry, is to overlook the high aim of all poetry; and that a poem may be in the highest sense didactic, which yet is epic, dramatic, or lyric in its form; and the Book of Job, the Psalms, and other poems contained in the Sacred Scriptures, are quoted as examples. In the poems generally called didactic, the information or instruction given in verse is accompanied with poetic reflections, illustrations, and episodes. The Georgics of Virgil has been the model for most didactic poems, and no subject is so unpromising that it has not found some one to select it as a poetic theme. Examples of admirable success as combinations of argument and poetry are the Ars Poetica of Horace and the Essay on Criticism of Pope. The great poem of Lucretius, again, stands the masterpiece of the philosophical poem, which is represented in our own language by poems like the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, and the Essay on Man of Pope. See POETRY.