Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "In Praise of Pliny" is an exuberant ode to Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, historian, and encyclopedist whose Naturalis Historia aimed to catalog the wonders of the known world. The poem revels in Pliny’s boundless curiosity and his willingness to include the fantastic alongside the factual, positioning him as a figure whose intellectual ambition and delight in the strange stand in stark contrast to the cynicism of the modern world. Webb’s poem is both a celebration of this ancient scholar and an implicit critique of contemporary attitudes toward wonder, belief, and discovery.

Webb begins by listing some of the most bizarre and mythical creatures recorded in Pliny’s work: "headless people with eyes on their shoulders, dog-headed people who bark, one-legged people who hop fast, mouthless people fed by the scent of roots and flowers, whom a stink can kill." These fantastical beings—mixtures of legend, traveler’s tales, and misunderstanding—signal Pliny’s openness to the unknown. Webb does not mock them; instead, he presents them as part of a worldview in which everything, even the incredible, has a place.

Pliny’s obsession with knowledge is conveyed through his relentless work ethic: "Twenty hours of every twenty-four, Pliny labored to stuff into his Historia Naturalis ‘the contents of the entire world.’" The hyperbolic phrasing underscores both Pliny’s ambition and his near-manic devotion to the task. Even in leisure, he could not afford distraction: "Servants read to him as he ate. No time to waste." The sheer urgency of his learning suggests an awareness that time is limited, that the pursuit of knowledge must be ceaseless.

Webb then delights in a series of eccentric facts recorded by Pliny: "how the elk-like achlis has no knees, and so cannot lie down to sleep," "how the mantichora has a lion’s body, scorpion’s tail, and human face with three rows of fangs." These entries, while often absurd, reveal a mind willing to entertain possibility rather than dismiss the unknown outright. Webb amplifies this sense of wonder by quoting Pliny’s poetic descriptions of the natural world: "the moon, he writes, ‘Now curved into the horns of a sickle, now rounded to a circle; spotted, and then suddenly shining clear, vast and full-orbed, then suddenly not there.’" This passage, free of scientific rigor yet rich in observation, highlights how Pliny was as much a poet of nature as a chronicler of it.

Pliny’s attention extended even to the mundane, and Webb captures his encyclopedic breadth in humorous detail: "He tells how to choose good onions, and make glue; how elephants write Greek, and hyenas call shepherds’ names." The juxtaposition of the practical and the fantastical—onions and elephants, glue-making and linguistic hyenas—reinforces the all-encompassing scope of Pliny’s curiosity. His medical remedies, however, take center stage for their absurdity: "To cure a headache, he asserts, crush snails on the forehead, coat the nose with vulture brains, wrap the temples with rope used in a suicide." The specificity of these bizarre treatments makes them both ridiculous and strangely compelling. Webb conveys them without judgment, allowing their sheer strangeness to speak for itself. He ends this list with a wry punchline: "For any ailment: chicken soup." Here, the ridiculous gives way to the familiar, subtly acknowledging how ancient wisdom, however strange, often contains enduring truths.

The poem shifts dramatically with the eruption of Vesuvius, an event that ultimately claimed Pliny’s life. Webb recounts his final moments with admiration: "Pliny—naval commander, confidant of emperors—sailed to Stabiae to save a friend. He jotted notes as pumice rattled his friend’s roof, and snored all night." This account presents Pliny as fearless, dedicated to both duty and intellectual curiosity even in the face of disaster. His death, as narrated by Webb, is almost cinematic: "Next morning, pillows shielding heads, his men struggled to launch their boat into high seas. When flames and sulfur gas swept down, Pliny collapsed." He dies as he lived—immersed in the world’s mysteries, unafraid of their consequences.

The final stanza delivers Webb’s critique of modernity. As Pliny lies dying, Webb asks whether he "could have conceived of people lacking all belief, devoid of wonder—two-dimensional people who scoff at everything, and swear their lives are dull and wretched as they roar in horseless chariots across the earth he loved, and soar in winged phalli through the astounding sky?" The contrast is stark: Pliny, whose insatiable curiosity embraced the miraculous, is set against a modern world that, despite technological advances, often finds itself spiritually impoverished. The phrase "two-dimensional people" suggests a loss of depth, of intellectual and emotional engagement with the world. The imagery of "horseless chariots" (cars) and "winged phalli" (airplanes) satirizes modern achievements, implying that despite physical advancements, something essential has been lost.

Ultimately, "In Praise of Pliny" is both a celebration of curiosity and an elegy for wonder. Webb does not ask the reader to believe in one-legged men or knee-less elks; rather, he invites us to admire a mind that sought to understand everything, that refused to dismiss possibility. In doing so, he makes a compelling case that skepticism and cynicism, if taken too far, impoverish the imagination. The poem’s humor, lyricism, and historical reverence combine to create a portrait of Pliny as not just an ancient scholar, but as a model for intellectual engagement—one who embraced the world’s contradictions and curiosities with unrelenting fascination.

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