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Most poetry that people use is jingles, greeting cards, and song lyrics. Some is didactic at the very simplest level--a religious moral--but I'd guess that most is simple sentiment or romantic love. Of course I don't really know what John means by didacticism. Is Ozymandius didactic? How about Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, or Tintern Abbey, or the immortality ode? Or the Cantos? Or does he mean Pope's moral essays in verse? At 11:53 PM 4/23/2010, you wrote: >On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 3:01 PM, John Herbert Cunningham < >[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Here's a question to mull over: For much of poetic history, didacticism was > > accepted if not, outright encouraged. Then came the Romantic era along > > with the 'show, don't say' aphorism. Didacticism fell out of favour. > > However, poets now are looking to medieval and baroque forms to provide > > structure to their poetry. Some, Lisa Robertson being a prime example, > > have > > gone back to the ancient Greeks and Romans - Virgil, in Robertson's case - > > to 'make it new'. In doing so, are they reviving didacticism as an > > acceptable form for, let's face it, Robertson's poetry is extremely > > didactic? > > > > >Maybe Didacticism fell out of favor among high literati, but most poetry >that people actually use is didactic, and has almost always been so. So if >the high artists are finally catching back up with the public, I suppose...I >dunno...well, *shrug* > > >-- >Uche Ogbuji http://uche.ogbuji.net >Founding Partner, Zepheira http://zepheira.com >Linked-in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ucheogbuji >Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/ >TNB: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/uogbuji/ >Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/uche >Twitter: http://twitter.com/uogbuji >http://www.google.com/profiles/uche.ogbuji Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The Nation