Dalzell presents three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon: the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, considering what tools are available for their understanding.

Dalzell presents three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon, the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, and considers what tools are available for their understanding.

This work offers a theoretical look at Latin didactic poems. It discusses the characteristics that make a poem didactic from the points of view of both theory and literary history, and traces the genre's history, from Hesiod to Roman times.

Here a team of established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. In previous scholarship, a drive to classify Greek and Latin didactic poetry has engaged with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre. The present volume approaches didactic poetry from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient near-eastern and contemporary African traditions). The issues raised include knowledge in its relation to power; the cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; the interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; the authority of the teacher.

This study of the Latin didactic poetry produced by the Jesuits in the early modern period reveals the literary qualities of these works, their compositional methods, and traditions.

The present volume contains twelve new essays on didactic verse, with a broad time-sweep ranging from the most ancient literature (Sumeria) through to the early-modern age (seventeenth-century England). Considered collectively, the contents illustrate the transmission of this important literary kind from Ancient to Modern times, and from east to west, from south to north. The Romantic age led to the lyric being seen as the dominant poetical mode, and today it has become almost axiomatic to view the chief function of poetry as the articulation of the thoughts and emotions of the individual; a concomitant assumption is that the essential quality of poetry is the aesthetic. However, in other cultures, and in earlier times, things were very different, and the didactic was long accorded a secure place as one of several prominent literary modes. While it is difficult to give a precise definition of the didactic, it may be said to be characteristically concerned with knowledge and wisdom, where the latter term inclines toward moral and religious instruction, and the former toward information both practical and encyclopaedic. The present contributions deal with the functioning of didactic verse in such widely diverse areas as: education in school; mnemotechnics; rhetoric, style and composition; farming; grammar; the natural world; cultural identity; liturgy and worship; aetiology; philosophy; politics; intertextuality; man as microcosm; the training of the soul; gender awareness. Truly, the classroom presided over by Calliope, the chief of muses, is no arid intellectual forcing-house but rather a place where the resources of rhetoric, learning and imagination are felicitously combined in the training of the individual mind and the betterment of society in general.