THE ART OF POETRY--THE POET AS TEACHER ~ Literary Hunt

The poet as teacher

One of the reasons most commonly used to defend the importance of poetry (as, for example, the English author Philip Sidney of the 16th century, in his essay "Apology for Poetry"), is that it may be both pleasurable and instructive. Of course, the best poetry should have these two qualities. But there is some poetry meant exclusively for instruction and often for preaching. The beauty is less important to the poet than his "message."'s meaning and influence.
The ancient Greeks called the kind of poetry didactic. One of the earliest Greek didactic poetry, by the poet Hesiod (eighth-century B.c.), is entitled Works and Days. It is literally a hands-on farming treatise.

Verse is sometimes used simply as a memory-

aid-particularly in teaching children. The

19th-century maker of this Flemish woodcut

and the author of the verses below it-"This

dog, dear children, that you see/Teaches you

how to wait patiently"-with pointing a moral

than creating art.were more concerned

But most didactic poets typically do not have these clear intentions. Many authors have attempted to educate their readers in science or metaphysical theory — like the Roman poet Lucretius '(first century B.C.) colossal all-inclusive poem On the Origin of Things. The English poet John Milton * of the 17th century composed his masterpiece Paradise Lost with an equally broad purpose: "to explain God's ways to man.

This engraving, from a 1751 edition of Edmund

Spenser's allegory The Faerie Queene, shows

Satan driving the seven deadly sins. In the

poem the ideals of the chivalric age are em-

bodied in characters like the Red Cross knight

(who represents holiness), Sir Guyon (tem-

perance), and the Lady Britomart (chastity).

Many didactic poets have set out to provide clear moral advice for their readers. This was part of the intention of Alexander Pope *, the English poet, in his "An Essay on Man," as in these lines:

Know, all the good that individuals find,
Or God and Nature meant to mere mankind,
Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three words-health, peace, and competence.

The didactic poet often communicates his argument indirectly. His poetry is meant to be an "image" of morality (like Jesus 'parables). For his spiritual reasons, the English poet Edmund Spenser (1552-99) used allegory: every character in his long poem The Faerie Queene portrays a different feature of human nature — such as innocence, sensuality, bravery, or cowardice in practice. And in the same direction, the section of Dante's Divine Comedy called the "Inferno" teaches a moral lesson: by demonstrating the awful plight of sinners in hell.

Didactic poetry, aside from philosophical and religious topics, is mostly supposed to sway readers towards certain political ideologies, such as the radical socialist poetry of Bertolt Brecht * from Germany or W. H. Auden from England (born 1907). Auden, for example, wrote in 1939:

Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong

However, more commonly it is some social evil-prejudice, oppression, deprivation or war-that fuels the rage of the poet and inspires a didactic poem.

Drawing by American artist Ben Shahn,

illustrating an anti-war poem by England's

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen's poetry-a

deeply felt protest against the horrors of war-

was the crystallization of his own experiences;

he fought in World War I, and was killed in

action on the Western front.

For example, several poets who fought in World War I wrote poetry that portrayed and taught the terror of modern warfare. One of the greatest "war poets" was the English author Robert Graves *, who wrote the following:

War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air.

To be precise, poems with straightforward instruction, like those of Lucretius or Pope, are scarcely published today. Prose has now become the agreed position for direct teaching and viewpoint, much as in journalism and the essay style. Modern poets typically express their "messages" implicitly, through social critique; they offer an example of good or bad (often derived from personal experience, as Graves 'poem was), and let the reader draw the conclusion for himself.

THE ART OF POETRY--THE POET AS TEACHER

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