DIDACTIC POETRY, that form of verse the aim of which is less to excite the hearer by passion or move him by pathos than to instruct his mind and improve his morals. The Greek word otbaKrucOs signifies apt for teaching, and poetry of the class under discussion approaches us with the arts and graces of a schoolmaster. Modern criticism is inclined to exclude the term "didactic poetry" from our nomenclature, as a phrase absurd in itself and indeed obsolete. But in earlier times, in the absence of all written books, this was the easiest way in which information could be made attractive to the ear and be retained by the memory.
In the prehistoric dawn of Greek civilization there was a great body of verse occupied entirely with increasing the knowledge of citizens in useful branches of art and observation; these were the beginnings of didactic poetry, and we class them together under the dim name of Hesiod. The Works and Days, which passes as the direct masterpiece of Hesiod (q.v.), may be taken as the type of all the poetry which has had education as its aim. In somewhat later times, as the Greek nation became better supplied with intellectual appliances, the stream of didactic poetry flowed more and more closely in one, and that a theological, channel. The great poem of Parmenides On Nature and those of Emped ocles exist only in fragments, but enough remains to show that these poets carried on the didactic method in mythology. Cleo stratus of Tenedos wrote an astronomical poem in the 6th century, and Periander a medical one in the 4th; but didactic poetry did not flourish again in Greece until the 3rd century, when Aratus, in the Alexandrian age, wrote his famous Phenomena, a poem about things seen in the heavens.
By far the greatest didactic Latin poet known to us is Lucretius, who 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. It was intended to instruct mankind in the interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed by Epicurus. What gave the poem of Lucretius its extraordinary interest, and what has prolonged and even increased its vitality, was the imaginative and illustrative insight of the author, piercing and lighting up the recesses of human experience. On a lower intellectual level, but of a still greater technical excellence, was the Georgics of Virgil, a poem on the processes of agriculture, published about 3o B.c. The brilliant execution of this famous work has justly made it the type and unapproachable standard of all poetry which desires to impart useful information in the guise of exquisite literature. In the rest of surviving Latin didactic poetry the influence and the imitation of Virgil and Lucretius are manifest. Manilius produced a fine Astronomica towards the close of the reign of Augustus. Columella, regretting that Virgil had omitted to sing of gardens, composed a smooth poem on horticulture. Natural philosophy inspired Lucilius junior, of whom a didactic poem on Etna survives. Long afterwards, under Diocletian, a poet of Carthage, Nemesianus, wrote in the manner of Virgil the Cyne getica, a poem on hunting with dogs, which has had numerous imitations in later European literatures.
In Anglo-Saxon and early English poetic literature, and espe cially in the religious part of it, an element of didacticism is not to be overlooked. The first English 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; these humble Georgics aimed at a practical description of the whole art of English farming. In the early part of the 17th century one or two writers appeared who were as didactic as the age would permit them to be, Samuel Daniel with his philosophy, Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke) with his "treatises" of war and monarchy. After the Restoration, as the lyrical element rapidly died out of English poetry, there was more and more room left for educational rhetoric in verse. The poems about prosody, founded upon Horace and signed by John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave (1648 1721), and Lord Roscommon, were among the earliest purely didactic verse-studies in English. John Philips deserves a certain pre-eminence, as his poem called Cyder, in 1706, set the fashion, which lasted all down the i8th century, of writing precisely in verse about definite branches of industry or employment. None of the greater poets of the age of Anne quite succumbed to the practice, but there is a very distinct flavour of the purely didactic about a great deal of the verse of Pope and Gray. In such produc tions as Gilbert West's Education, Dyer's Fleece, and Somerville's Chase, technical information is put forward as the central aim of the poet. In 1748 Gray began, though he failed to finish, a didactic poem on The Alliance of Education and Govern ment. Didactic poems were discredited by the publication of The Sugar-Cane (1764), a long verse-treatise about the cultivation of sugar by negroes in the West Indies, by James Grainger (5721. 66). Whether so great a writer as Cowper is to be counted among the didactic poets is a question on which readers of The Task may be divided; this poem belongs rather to the class of descrip tive poetry, but a strong didactic tendency is visible in parts of it. Perhaps the latest frankly educational poem which enjoyed a great popularity was The Course of Time by Robert Pollok (1798-1827), in which a system of Calvinistic divinity is laid down in the pomp of blank verse. This kind of literature had already been exposed, and discouraged, by the teaching of Words worth, who had insisted on the imperative necessity of charging all poetry with imagination and passion. Oddly enough, The Ex cursion of Wordsworth himself is perhaps the most didactic poem of the 19th century, but it must be acknowledged that his influ ence, in this direction, was saner than his practice.
The history of didactic poetry in France repeats, in great measure, but in drearier language, that of England. Boileau, like Pope, but with a more definite purpose as a teacher, offered instruction in his Art poetique and in his Epistles. But his doc trine was always literary, not purely educational. At the begin ning of the i8th century the younger Racine (1692-1763) wrote sermons in verse, and at the close of it the Abbe Delille (1738 1813) tried to imitate Virgil in poems about horticulture.
During the century which preceded the Romantic revival of poetry in Germany didactic verse was cultivated in that country on the lines of imitation of the French, but with a greater dryness and on a lower level of utility. Modern German literature began with Martin Opitz (1597-1639) and the Silesian School, who were in their essence rhetorical and educational, and who gave their tone to German verse. Albrecht von Haller (1708-77) brought a very considerable intellectual force to bear on his huge poems, The Origin of Evil, which was theological, and The Alps (1729), botanical and topographical. Johann Peter Uz (172o-96) wrote a Theodicee, which was very popular, and not without dig nity. Johann Jacob Dusch (1725-87) undertook to put The Sciences into the eight books of a great didactic poem. Tiedge (1752-1840) was the last of the school; in a once-famous Urania he sang of God and Immortality and Liberty. These German pieces were the most unswervingly didactic that any modern European literature has produced. There was hardly the pretence of introducing into them descriptions of natural beauty, as the English poets did, or of grace and wit like the French.