ABSTRACT
The notion that poetry's goal is to amuse and instruct the reader is a venerable one in Western aesthetics. In his Poetics, Aristotle links "the art of poetry" to both "pleasure" and "learning."1 Horace explains that:
From the outset, canonical English critics adopt Horace's stance as their own, though with varying degrees of emphasis and usually without such blunt acknowledgment of poets' financial motives. Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry (1595), for instance, describes poetry's "end" as "to teach and delight," and goes on to "affirm, that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach and move thereto so much as Poetry."3 A century and a half later, Samuel Johnson concurs succinctly: "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing."4
