The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid

Alexander David Kurke is a criminal lawyer in Sudbury, Ontario.

This book began as a series of lectures by the author at the University
of Toronto in 1990. Dalzell’s primary goal in the five essays is to
assess Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Virgil’s Georgics, and Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria as examples of didactic poetry.

There is a tension inherent in assessing poetry that instructs. Should
the focus be on teaching or on giving pleasure? Dalzell, who sensibly
approaches the poetry on its own terms, poses two “fundamental
questions”: “What is the attitude of the author to the reader as it
is implied by the text?” and “What is the attitude, manifested in
the poem itself, which the author adopts towards his didactic
message?”

Not surprisingly, Dalzell finds that the De Rerum Natura takes its
Epicurean message seriously. However, he also concludes that Lucretius
was a poet describing a philosophy, not a philosopher. Dalzell views
with some suspicion modern attempts to find something deeper in
Virgil’s Georgics than poetry about farming (many scholars will remain
convinced that the poem is much less about tilling the soil than about
the literary agendas of Augustan Rome). He concludes that Ovid’s Ars
Amatoria is a “mock didactic poem, a didactic poem for those who do
not need to learn.” The emperor Augustus, who banished Ovid from Rome,
appears to have agreed that Ars Amatoria is all about mockery.

Dalzell presents his arguments with grace and clarity. His book will be
of particular interest to students of classical literature.