The literary critics of antiquity commonly divided poetry up into genres: epic, lyric, elegy, comedy, tragedy, and so on. The Greeks mastered these genres, and the Romans sought to emulate them, but they often fell short of their models, and in only one genre, didactic, did they decisively outclass the Greek achievement. Through moral and intellectual intensity and (as Cicero saw) by possessing both craftsmanship and natural genius, Lucretius found possibilities in the didactic form that no one had found before, and thus, through his influence on Virgil, he was to affect the course of Western
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