Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on December 21, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(2):216-220; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm123
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Some Versions of Lucretian Style
*The University of Chicago.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
If there were a distinct category called "didactic verse," we might save ourselves considerable trouble when reading and discussing such poems as Nicander's Theriaca or Manilius'c Astronomica or Horace's Ars Poetica or Pope's Essay on Man. The author of such works has some instruction or information that he feels called upon to impart to his intended readers and decides to provide his stolid matter with the sort of charming veneer that poetic rhetoric and poetic patterns can bestow. In this strategy the delightful and the useful can enter into a fragile alliance, not a marriage of compatibles but an awkward if beneficial partnership of the mismatched. Yet, the charm of such compositions, however skilful and sophisticated it may be, remains thoroughly subordinate to the content that it has been called upon to decorate or, Lucretianally speaking, to sweeten, and this imbalance between matter and manner is permanently incapable of