Gnomic poetry

Meaningful opinions put into verse to aid the memory

Gnomic poetry consists of meaningful sayings put into verse to aid the memory. They were known by the Greeks as gnomes (c. f. the Greek adjective γνωμικός (gnomikos) "appertaining to an opinion or aphorism"). A gnome was defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham as "a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done". It belongs to the broad family of wisdom literature, which expresses general truths about the world. Topics range over the divine and secular, from moral aphorisms to hierarchical social relationships.

The gnomic poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century BC, were those who arranged series of sententious maxims in verse. These were collected in the 4th century, by Lobon of Argos, an orator, but his collection has disappeared.

Gnomes are frequently to be found in the ancient literatures of Arabia, Persia and India, in Anglo Saxon poetry and in the Icelandic staves. Comparable with the Anglo Saxon examples are the Early Welsh gnomic poems. The priamel, a brief, sententious kind of poem, which was in favor in Germany from the 12th to the 16th centuries, belonged to the true gnomic class, and was cultivated with particular success by Hans Rosenblut, the lyrical goldsmith of Nuremberg, in the 15th century. Gnomic literature, including Maxims I and Maxims II, is a genre of Medieval Literature in England. The gnomic spirit has occasionally been displayed by poets of a homely philosophy, such as Francis Quarles (1592–1644) in England and Gui de Pibrac (1529–1584) in France. The once celebrated Quatrains of the latter, published in 1574, enjoyed an immense success throughout Europe; they were composed in deliberate imitation of the Greek gnomic writers of the 6th century BC. With the gnomic writings of Pibrac it was long customary to bind up those of Antoine Faber (or Favre) (1557–1624) and of Pierre Mathieu (1563–1621).