ABSTRACT
Over millennia there have been poems that have taught everything from the origins of life on earth to how to tune a six-cylinder engine. Traditional societies have passed on rites and legends in the form of poems: rhythmic tellings that traced stories everyone in the society was expected to know. Some sorts of knowledge are firmly anchored in groups, but there is an enormous amount of fact and intuition that depends on the individual’s perspective and for which the didactic poem has been a natural outlet. Such poems inform, satirize, lecture, or persuade, as they see fit. In all cases, they have something instructional to impart, whether it be down-to-earth or esoteric. What the didactic poet has to think about is how a poem, as opposed to an instruction booklet, can be the best way to impart some knowledge.
