Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 53, Then came hard iron.

This program is about Virgil's great middle poem, The Georgics.

Put into circulation in 29 b.C.

Virgil's Georgics came out about eight years after his eclogs, those ten pastoral poems

about herdsmen, rustic love affairs, and the mixed blessings of country life that we looked

at last time.

The Georgics, published when Virgil was about 41 years old, can most simply be described

as poems about rural labor, farming, the cultivation of plants, animal husbandry, and even the subject

of beekeeping.

Just before the beginning of the 18th century, the English poet John Dryden famously described Virgil's

Georgics as, quote, the best poem of the best poet, close quote. And while this assessment is certainly clear, it's not a common one.

Kimberly Johnson, whose 2009 translation of the Georgics has become a classic in its own right

describes the Georgics as a quote

lovely and strange achievement close quote

a poem that is as demanding on the reader as it is the product of a lost

and unfamiliar genre.

In previous episodes we've talked a bit about didactic poetry, that genre of verse that takes often scientific

and technical subjects and discusses them in metered lines.

While Virgil's Georgics might be the most famous didactic poem in literary history, it was not the first

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