Pastoral Poetry
Pastoral poetry is a literary genre that idealizes rural life and nature, often depicting shepherds and rustic settings. It originated in ancient Greek and Roman literature and has been a popular theme in English literature, particularly during the Renaissance. Pastoral poetry typically explores themes of love, beauty, and the simplicity of rural existence, offering an escape from the complexities of urban life.
7 Key excerpts on "Pastoral Poetry"
eBook - ePubEnglish Pastoral Music
From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900-1955
- Eric Saylor(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- University of Illinois Press(Publisher)
...1. What Is Pastoralism? As even casual surveys quickly reveal, “pastoral” sports almost as many definitions as it does people who wish to describe it. Among literary specialists, the term traditionally denotes a type of poetry focusing on the lives of shepherds or herdsmen, often (though not exclusively) set against the backdrop of classical antiquity or an idyllic Golden Age. 1 However, a tension exists between describing pastoral this way, as a genre (i.e., defined in part by the presence of certain formal characteristics) versus the equally common method of framing it as a mode (i.e., “the place in which our notion of the world comes to be manifested in the text”). 2 Many authors also treat the pastoral as a discrete style capable of invoking various literary traits—so many, in fact, that Lawrence Buell has observed that it potentially encompasses “all literature—poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction—that celebrates the ethos of nature/rurality over…the ethos of the town or city.” 3 This more inclusive construction of the pastoral has obliged literary theorists to acknowledge (sometimes reluctantly) the often messy evolution and transformation of its meaning, in which style, mode, and genre all overlap and interact. 4 For instance, William Empson's characterization of pastoralism as a “process of putting the complex into the simple” turns the pastoral into an abstract creative concept rather than a concrete set of literary traits. 5 More poetically still, Kate Kennedy describes the pastoral as “a genre shaped by nostalgia: the distance between the present and memory, and the physical distance between the location of the writer and the absent landscape described.” 6 These are but two of the many ways that pastoral literature has been reimagined and reinvented over...
eBook - ePubEncyclopedia of Comparative Iconography
Themes Depicted in Works of Art
- Helene E. Roberts, Helene E. Roberts(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The pastoral mode long retained its popularity, although interpretation of the elements comprising it may have changed. From antiquity on, pastoral literature was designed for an aristocratic taste; indeed, in seventeenth-century France, pastoral was the leading literary genre. In the Renaissance, idealized representations of the ancient shepherd merged with ideals of courtly love. The fact that the real life of a shepherd is a hard and lonely one was usually conveniently ignored. Nostalgia for what is presumed to be a golden past is the prevalent emotion. The shepherdess, too, had her beginning in pastoral literature. She appeared as a true peasant figure on occasion; at other times, she was not constrained to work but engaged in idealized pursuits of the pastoral life. In Eclogues (circa 42–37 b.c.), Virgil adapted a set of Greek bucolic tales involving shepherds, singing contests, laments for lovers (usually lost), and similar themes couched in bantering dialogue. In this genre, he followed Theocritus of Syracuse, who had developed these rustic myths into a branch of Greek literature. Tradition later associated them not with Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, but with Arcadia in mainland Greece. The mythical founder of this branch of poetry was said to be the shepherd Daphnis, who was blinded by a nymph (or by Aphrodite, goddess of love) and spent the remainder of his life composing sad songs about his fate. This Daphnis is not to be confused with a later one, the shepherd in Longus’s pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe (second or third century a.d.). Among the Virgilian shepherds whose names persist through later centuries were Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Corydon, and among the shepherdesses were Phyllis and Amaryllis. For example, Amaryllis reappears in Torquato Tasso’s drama L’Aminta (1573) and in Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1590)...
...1 FOUR KINDS OF PASTORAL The term ‘pastoral’ is used in four broadly different ways. First, the pastoral is a historical form with a long tradition which began in poetry, developed into drama and more recently could be recognised in novels and nature writing. We can speak of Renaissance pastoral dramas, such as Shakespeare’s, or of Augustan Pastoral Poetry, such as Pope’s, and agree that we are talking about a literary form that is used in each of these periods, and we can recognise motifs that derive from certain early Greek and Roman poems about life in the country, and about the life of the shepherd in particular. Indeed, to refer to ‘pastoral’ up to about 1610 was to refer to poems or dramas of a specific formal type in which supposed shepherds spoke to each other, usually in pentameter verse, about their work or their loves, with apparently idealised descriptions of their countryside. This form of writing was so recognisably pastoral that it might almost be called a genre. In the best work in this European tradition, idealisation of the environment was complicated by the labour involved in working in it, or the tensions of love relationships experienced in it; in the weakest texts only simple idealisation is offered to the reader. This definition of pastoral is summed up by Leo Marx as ‘ No shepherd, no pastoral’ (Marx 1986: 45). For the reader or audience, this literary device, that was a fundamental pastoral movement, involved some form of retreat and return, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat ‘returned’ some insights relevant to the urban or court readership. But beyond the artifice of the specific literary form, there is a broader use of ‘pastoral’ to refer to an area of content. In this sense pastoral refers to any literature that describes the country as providing an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban...
...By pastorals we mean a particular kind of poem: the idylls of Theocritus, the eclogues of Virgil and Spenser, the Pastorals of Pope, are all poems of the same formal type, ‘mixed’ poems of description and dialogue, part-narrative, part-dramatic, and usually but not always in either hexameter or pentameter verse. For critics from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, pastoral in this sense means a particular kind or genre of literature, like Tragedy, Comedy, Satire or Epic, possessing like them its own decorum. More broadly, however, when we speak of pastoral in the singular, we mean really a view of life, an ethos or informing principle which can subsist either in itself, as in the poets enumerated above, or which can animate other forms of literature like the drama, whether they be wholly pastoral (as in the case of As You Like It) or only partially so (as in the cases of The Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline or The Tempest). Hence the word pastoral refers both to form and to content. The great characteristic of Pastoral Poetry is that it is written when an ideal or at least more innocent world is felt to be lost, but not so wholly as to destroy the memory of it or to make some imaginative intercourse between present reality and past perfection impossible. As Professor Kermode puts it (English Pastoral Poetry, p. 15) Pastoral Poetry never arises in a time when there are children, as there are now, who have never seen a cow. Pastoral is therefore written from a point of view that we may call sophisticated. Nostalgia cannot be the emotion of those who are not conscious of having experienced a loss, and shepherds therefore do not write Pastoral Poetry. Were they capable of any kind of poetic production, the probability is that they would write from either a spirit of antagonism to their wretchedness, or a spirit of complacency in their comparative happiness: either alternative would destroy the fragile equilibrium that pastoral maintains...
eBook - ePub- Deborah Lilley(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Pastoral relations People, place, and nature in contemporary British literary fiction The turn towards place in contemporary British literary fiction has been driven by questions of belonging and influence, framed through rising political tensions, economic uncertainties, and environmental concerns. The pastoral is being used to structure and explore these questions, and examine the shifting cultural and ecological landscapes of the country. The dualisms that the mode animates – between conceptions of the country and the city, the past and the present, and the human and the natural – are placed under new pressures in this context. Factors ranging from borders and Brexit to changing technologies and industries to climate change and sea level rise test the limits of pastoral and its capacity to represent and reflect upon the conditions in which it is being written. It is at these limits that the mode’s critical potential is reinvigorated. Where the rural idyll is absent, where its divisions of space and thought upset expectations, where the effects of retreat are found in new places and altered circumstances, new versions of pastoral – and new insights about contemporary Britain – can be found. 1 As I discussed in Chapter 1, the continuing relevance of pastoral in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has long been subject to debate. For Timothy Morton, for instance, ‘we need a whole new way of evoking the environment’ (2010, 15). The viability of the pastoral concepts of the country and the city in contemporary Britain, and therefore the critical potential of the contrast between them, has attracted particular criticism. In their 1974 analysis of pastoral, John Barrell and John Bull argued against the usefulness of the form, given that ‘it is difficult to pretend that the English countryside is now anything more than an extension of the town’ (1974, 432)...
eBook - ePubBritish Film Music
Musical Traditions in British Cinema, 1930s–1950s
- Paul Mazey(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...This alternation between narrative and spectacular elements is theorised in the influential work of Laura Mulvey. For Mulvey, the male gaze of the cinema finds visual pleasure in the spectacle of Woman, whose presence on screen threatens to suspend the progress of the narrative: ‘to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (1975, 11). Spectacular landscape scenes risk the same suspension of the narrative drive, and the visual pleasure to be found in landscape also complies with Mulvey’s formulation of ‘ to-be-looked-at-ness ’ (1975, 11). 2 Many of the films considered in this chapter contain pastoral scenes, in the sense that they combine music and imagery in a way that romanticises the natural environment. The term ‘pastoral’ may be understood in a number of ways, and its usage has widened over time. From its original description of a poetic form wherein shepherds rhapsodise about love and the beauty of the countryside, it has expanded to encompass all art forms that portray country life in an idealised fashion (Gifford 1999, 1–2). It may be broadly defined as a genre that presents ‘rural life or is expressive of its atmosphere’ (Chew 2001, 217). The pastoral form is based upon oppositions between town and country, retreat and return, and its frequently allegorical nature is aimed at a ‘knowing’ urban audience. Although the films discussed here may be more generally categorised as those in which the natural environment plays a significant role, some also manifest key elements of the pastoral form. As well as containing imagery and music that is pastoral in nature, they may adopt the form of retreat and return that the pastoral text epitomises. In this respect, Love Story (Leslie Arliss, 1944) is exemplary...
eBook - ePubThomas Hardy's Pastoral
An Unkindly May
- Indy Clark(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...4 Pastoral and Modernity By the end of the nineteenth century many commentators may have been reporting the death of pastoral as a literary convention, but the pastoral impulse was alive and well thanks largely to modernity. As Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, any attempt to define ‘modernity’ is confounded by dissonance, difference, and, perhaps most importantly, an opposition between the meanings signified by social theorists on the one hand and aestheticians on the other. Modernity, she claims, ‘is a term at war with itself, a term that unravels its own definition’ (505). For my purposes, I am considering the effects of a modernity characterized by ‘a specific set of historical conditions developing in the West, including the industrial revolution … the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation state, and growing power of the bourgeoisie’ (500). Industrial capitalism, the driving force of Western modernity, had created factories, cities, and two new classes in the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The wealth and power of the latter – largely at the expense of the former – were not enough to appease their sense of loss over a world they had played a large part in destroying. Past societies were seen as more organic, more coherent; their simple ways of life would assuage the feelings of rootlessness and alienation that the modern world had brought with it. The subsequent process of selection, manipulation, and even invention, constructed an idealized England that owed much to bourgeois fantasies of what living in the country should be and very little to actual rural relations. The first three sections of this chapter explore how Hardy’s poetry never fully accepts the largely middle-class construction of an English national identity of rurality and order, particularly at times of war...
