Didactic Poetry

Fables book.jpg

Felt, Oliver Selwyn. Fables in Verse. Illustrated by John W. Watson. Crosby and Nichols, 1864.

Fables are one of the oldest forms of literature. Among Western readers, the fables of Aesop, an ancient Greek storyteller, remain the best known. Though probably intended for adults when they were written, their entertaining animal characters and practical, easy-to-understand lessons eventually led them to become a go-to resource for teaching basic morals to children. Hundreds of editions and adaptations, often with lively illustrations, have been published since the invention of Western printing in the fifteenth century, and the poems were especially popular in the Victorian era.

Other examples of didactic poetry in the Prelutsky Collection can be thought of as building on Aesop’s foundation. British and American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including Isaac Watts and Lydia Sigourney, gave their own expressions to timeless themes like hard work, honesty, humility, persistence, kindness, and the importance of setting a good example. At the same time, inspired by Christian piety and various social reform movements, their poems sometimes went a step farther, addressing even weightier topics. Anger and addiction. Racism and injustice. Disease and death. How should adults prepare children to deal with serious issues such as these? Poetry, some saw, was one option. Through rhyme and simple language, children’s attention could be focused on challenging topics with the goal of helping them develop a mindset for overcoming the difficulties they were sure to encounter.

Writers like Watts and Sigourney were not opposed to fun, but they did encourage young people to spend their time wisely, i.e., on educational and moral pursuits. Consequently, they tended to regard works of fantasy and pure playfulness as not the best use of time. Writers of fantasy, in turn, sometimes felt that didactic poetry lacked imagination. Was this fair? One of the major goals of didactic poetry was to nurture a habit in children of showing concern for others. Orphans, the poor, and animals were common subjects, and though never frequently enough, as the abolitionist movement grew, slaves and people of color were sometimes considered as well. Isn’t trying to understand what someone else is going through a form of imagination? Some didactic poems, moreover, are imaginative in their use of language. And those that anthropomorphize animals, most notably Aesop’s fables, are anything but unimaginative. Didactic poets may not have regarded imagination as an end in itself, but in their own way, they did see its value in the larger goal of moral improvement.

The Prelutsky Collection contains at least one example of a work which playfully questions the wisdom of didactic poetry while being didactic itself. In L. J. Bridgman’s Jest-nuts (1903), more than a dozen famous proverbs are followed by a rhyming poem about a situation in which the proverb clearly does not apply. The old saying “still waters run deep,” for instance, doesn’t ring true for a frog that jumps into a still puddle and bumps his nose. The moral of the story may be that traditional wisdom has its place, but so does one’s own sense of reason.