The one absolute didactic poem, and its opposite: Schelling on ancient didactic poetry and the scienticity of contemporary lyric

Abstract

This article analyses how Friedrich Schelling’s account of ancient didactic poetry in ThePhilosophy ofArtisderivedfromafundamental distinctionbetween epicandlyric as kinds of poetic consciousness. It then uses Schelling’s theorization of didactic poetry as a subjective inflection of Homeric epic to investigate three didactic poems that make lyric knowledge the generative condition of their own existence: the Theriaca of Nicander, the Cynegetica of pseudo-Oppian, and the anonymous Latin Aetna. Finally, it considers how Schelling’s distinction between epic and lyric consciousness might yet be useful in understanding the role of scientific vocabulary in the poetry of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan. Much of the revival of interest in Schelling in the last decade or so has been concerned with the place of literature in his philosophical project as the unity in expression of subject and object that philosophy can indicate but not instantiate. 1 Aside, however, from acknowledgement of the special place of tragedy in his conception of literature, little attention has been paid to the details of Schelling’s literary history. This neglect is regrettable, for the comprehensive treatment of ancient literature in The Philosophy of Art offers fine-grained exemplification of just how it is that literature works as the organon of philosophy. In addition, this exemplification is itself an implicit theorization of why poems resist reification as historical artifacts and so has much to offer reception studies for the grounding of a transhistorical comparative methodology. In this article, then, I show how Schelling’s account of ancient didactic poetry is derived from a fundamental distinction between epic and lyric as kinds of poetic consciousness, what Schelling’s theorization of didactic poetry as a lyrical inflection of epic reveals about Hellenistic didactic poetry, and suggest some ways in which this theorization of didactic