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

This article analyses how Friedrich Schelling's account of ancient didactic poetry in The Philosophy of Art is derived from a fundamental distinction between epic and lyric 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.