Edmund William Gosse

“ No farmer, however elegant, will, any longer choose to study agriculture in hexameters, or even in Tusser’s shambling metre. The sciences and the professions will not waste their time on methods of instruction which must, from their very nature, be artless, inexact and vague. But in the morning of the world, those who taught with authority might well believe that verse was the proper, nay, the only serious vehicle of their instruction. ”

“ The Greek word διδακτικός signifies a teacher, from the verb διδάσκειν, and poetry of the class under discussion approaches us with the arts and graces of a schoolmaster. At no time was it found convenient to combine lyrical verse with instruction, and therefore from the beginning of literature the didactic poets have chosen a form approaching the epical. Modern criticism, which discourages the epic, and is increasingly anxious to limit the word “poetry” to lyric, is inclined to exclude the term “didactic poetry” from our nomenclature, as a phrase absurd in itself. ”

“ A highly finished translation by Cicero into Latin hexameters of the principal works of Aratus is believed to have drawn the attention of Lucretius to this school of Greek poetry, and it was not without reference to the Greeks, although in a more archaic and far purer taste, that he composed, in the 1st century before Christ, his magnificent De rerum natura. By universal consent, this is the noblest didactic poem in the literature of the world. ”

“ This is didactic poetry proper, and this, it is almost certain, became irrevocably obsolete at the close of the 18th century. No future Virgil will give the world a second Georgics. But there is another species which it is very improbable that criticism has entirely dislodged; that is the poetry which combines, with philosophical instruction, an impetus of imaginative movement, and a certain definite cultivation of fire and beauty. ”

“ In Anglo-Saxon and early English poetic literature, and especially in the religious part of it, an element of didacticism is not to be overlooked. But it would be difficult to say that anything of importance was written in verse with the sole purpose of imparting information, until we reach the 16th century. Some of the later medieval allegories are didactic or nothing. The first poem, however, which we can in any reasonable way compare with the classic works of which we have been speaking is the Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, published in 1557 by Thomas Tusser ”

“ Instead of a passionate pleasure, or at least an uplifted enthusiasm, being the poet’s object, he frankly admits that, first and foremost, he has some facts about wool or dogs or schoolmasters which he wishes to bring home to his readers, and that, secondly, he consents to use verse, as brilliantly as he can, for the purpose of gilding the pill and attracting an unwilling attention. ”

“ It was intended to instruct mankind in the interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed by Epicurus, which at that time was exciting the sympathetic attention of all classes of Roman society. ”