What to write about?
For some writers (I suspect only the very greatest), a great work can be written about any topic whatsoever.
The best example of this is, perhaps, Virgil’s Georgics, written in 29 B.C., a long poem of over 2,000 lines that Dryden called “the greatest poem by the greatest poet.”
What is the Georgics about?
It’s about how “to turn the soil, and wed vines to elms, what tending the cattle need, what care the herd in breeding, what skill the thrifty bees.” In short, it’s a poem derived from Varro’s dry treatise on agriculture.
It’s full of technical passages about the plow, weather signs, soil types and how to test them, agricultural trench depths, matching soil types with plants, fertilizers, digging techniques, the growth of fruit trees, when to plant vines, how to breed cattle, how to choose a good horse, problems involved in breeding an aged stallion, how to train cattle to pull carts, how to shear wool from sheep, how to discourage a snake infestation, common diseases among livestock, how to extract honey from a beehive . . . and more! Actually, much more.
There’s also a magnificent description of a thunderstorm, a paean to the lands of Italy, and a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—but technical agricultural passages predominate.
And yet, Virgil plows this dry agricultural topic into a lush poem that grows to sublimity on nearly every page. It’s full of fertile inspirations that renew a reader’s sense of how beautiful the world is, of how wonderful its processes are, of how magnificent it is to live!
The English translation by Harriet Waters Preston is excellent, and it’s read by a strong group of readers at librivox. (Link here: https://librivox.org/georgics-by-virgil/); but if you can read any Latin at all, it’s an experience you won’t forget.
As Virgil writes at book two line 434: “Why need I pursue greater themes?” (“quid maiora sequar?”)
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.