Didactic Poetry

In his introduction to Scott Cairns’s collection, Slow Pilgrim, Gregory Wolfe recounts Cairns’s development as a poet. He grew up “within a powerful religious subculture that splits the spirit off from the letter, reducing faith to didactic legalism. These fellow religionists of his youth loved nothing better than to turn Christianity into a set of moral propositions to be brought down like so many sledgehammers upon the unrighteous” (xx).

Encountering the literary elite, Cairns found “a throng of writers who seem to think that the poet’s job is simply to recount a past experience and sprinkle it with insights gleaned along the way – a milder form of didacticism, but a secular analogue to the sermon nonetheless” (xx).

He discovers, in short, that “the fundamentalist and the literary hipster share a tendency to turn language into communication – so many messages from the past inserted into so many edifying bottles” (xx). Once the bottle is empty, it’s good for nothing but the trash.

Great literature, Wolfe argues, “moves past communication to become communion – a journey of mutual discovery that takes place between speaker and hearer, an encounter that both have with a mystery that is both a presence and something experienced in the present.” What Cairns discovered is, in a word, a “sacramental poetics.”

Everyone will know what Wolfe is targeting, and it is indeed regrettable. Art that serves as adornment to a message external to the art is no art at all. I have nothing against “sacramental poetics,” nothing to say in defense of “legalistic didacticism.”

But I am skeptical about both the form of his argument and its conclusion. His analysis polarizes things that many artists have striven to keep together. Instruction is one of the great aims of poetry – so said Horace, neither a fundamentalist nor a hipster. That is, poets, including the greatest of them, have always meant to communicate. Dante is as didactic as they come.

And I am equally skeptical, if not more so, that great poetry is characterized by the kind of pilgrimage that Wolfe describes. Dante’s alter ego is on a pilgrimage, and he learns along the way; but Dante wrote the Comedy after having learned the lessons that he then intends to teach.

Not all didacticism is legalistic; nor is all of it unartistic.