Robin Hamilton wrote:
>> I think I remain, with Mark, unsure what you mean exactly by the
>> term, didactic.
>>
>> Doug
>
> How about Hesiod's _Works and Days_?
>
> Other than that, I don't see how the term is that meaningful.
>
> Seems as if we're rehashing the ground that Aristotle cleared in the
> Poetics, when he said that not all verse is poetry.
>
> Dress up a treatise on agriculture in what was the 5thC BC equivalent
> of rhyme and you still have a treatise on agriculture.
Well, the taxonomic problem here is how to define it as not poetry--or
how to define certain texts as poetry and exclude it? I try to do this
in my taxonomy by dividing verbal expression into literature, advocature
(verbal propaganda) and informrature. I also divide it into prose and
poetry, poetry having what I call a significant amount of "flow-breaks,"
the line-break being the most obvious one, prose not. I consider verse
metric poetry, or a kind of poetry, not non-poetry.
Lyric poetry is literary poetry, or poetry whose main object seems to a
consensus of informed observers to be giving aesthetic pleasure (which I
define in my aesthetics but won't here, except to say that it's pretty
conventional); advocoetry is poetry whose main intent is to persuade,
and informetry is information-providing poetry, as in the example Robin
gives. Didactic poetry could be morally didactic and thus advo, or
educationally didactic and thus info.
>
> Not often I find myself agreeing with Ol' Al, but for once I'm with
> him on this.
>
> Robin
>
It's Ari, not Al, you buffoon.
--Bob
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