The history of didactic poetry in France repeats, in great measure, but in drearier language, that of England. Boileau, like Pope, but with a more definite purpose as a teacher, offered instruction in his _Art poétique_ and in his _Epistles_. But his doctrine was always literary, not purely educational. At the beginning of the 18th century, the younger Racine (1692-1763) wrote sermons in verse, and at the close of it the Abbé Delille (1738-1813) tried to imitate Virgil in poems about horticulture. Between these two there lies a vast mass of verse written for the indulgence of intellect rather than at the dictates of the heart; wherever this aims at increasing knowledge, it at once becomes basely and flatly didactic. There is nothing in French literature of the transitional class that deserves mention beside _The Task_ or _The Excursion_.
During the century which preceded the Romantic revival of poetry in Germany, didactic verse was cultivated in that country on the lines of imitation of the French, but with a greater dryness and on a lower level of utility. Modern German literature began with Martin Opitz (1597-1639) and the Silesian School, who were in their essence rhetorical and educational, and who gave their tone to German verse. Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) brought a very considerable intellectual force to bear on his huge poems, _The Origin of Evil_, which was theological, and _The Alps_ (1729), botanical and topographical. Johann Peter Uz (1720-1796) wrote a _Theodicée_, which was very popular, and not without dignity. Johann Jacob Dusch (1725-1787) undertook to put _The Sciences_ into the eight books of a great didactic poem. Tiedge (1752-1840) was the last of the school; in a once-famous _Urania_, he sang of God and Immortality and Liberty. These German pieces were the most unswervingly didactic that any modern European literature has produced. There was hardly the pretence of introducing into them descriptions of natural beauty, as the English poets did, or of grace and wit like the French. The German poets simply poured into a lumbering mould of verse as much solid information and direct instruction as the form would hold.
Didactic poetry has, in modern times, been antipathetic to the spirit of the Latin peoples, and neither Italian nor Spanish literature has produced a really notable work in this class. An examination of the poems, ancient and modern, which have been mentioned above, will show that from primitive times there have been two classes of poetic work to which the epithet didactic has been given. It is desirable to distinguish these a little more exactly. One is the pure instrument of teaching, the poetry which desires to impart all that it knows about the growing of cabbages or the prevention of disasters at sea, the revolution of the planets or the blessings of inoculation. This is didactic poetry proper, and this, it is almost certain, became irrevocably obsolete at the close of the 18th century. No future Virgil will give the world a second _Georgics_. But there is another species which it is very improbable that criticism has entirely dislodged; that is the poetry which combines, with philosophical instruction, an impetus of imaginative movement, and a certain definite cultivation of fire and beauty. In hands so noble as those of Lucretius and Goethe this species of didactic poetry has enriched the world with durable masterpieces, and, although the circle of readers which will endure scientific disquisition in the bonds of verse grows narrower and narrower, it is probable that the great poet who is also a great thinker will now and again insist on being heard. In Sully-Prudhomme France has possessed an eminent writer whose methods are directly instructive, and both _La Justice_ (1878) and _Le Bonheur_ (1888) are typically didactic poems. Perhaps future historians may name these as the latest of their class. (E. G.)