Didactic Poetry

[Anonymous No.19996432]

>Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Æschylus rather than Plato as my model.
From the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley.
This is an opinion I've seen repeated but Shelley is the only poet I respect who I've also read voicing it. An analogous opinion badly expressed reads like when someone without a real clue about music talks about what is and what isn't "music". It's like when some scholar or commentator talks about how poets are divinely inspired when the holder of such an opinion has never created anything of artistic merit. But Shelley puts it fairly, "supererogatory in verse". Can any anons think of good and bad examples of didactic poetry?

[Anonymous No.19996486]

>>19996432
>in this didactic probity, but artistic disingenuousness, there lies the downfall of Greek Tragedy; for the Folk soon noticed that it did not want instinctively to move their Feeling, but arbitrarily to rule their Understanding. Euripides had to shed blood beneath the lash of Aristophaneian ridicule, for this open blurting of the lie.

[Anonymous No.19996597]

Pope's Essay on Criticism*
*it's in verse btw

[Anonymous No.19996891]

>>19996597
Thanks I haven't read this before