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Pastoral poetry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pastoral poetry is a literary work dealing with the lives of shepherds or rural life in general and typically drawing a contrast between the innocence and serenity of a simple life and the misery and corruption of city and especially court life.
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The characters in pastoral poetry are often used as vehicles for the expression of the author's moral, social, or literary views. Sometimes uses the device of "singing matches" between two or more shepherds. Themes often include love and death.
The devices of pastoral poetry were largely established by Theocritus. The tradition was passed from Greece to Rome, where Virgil alluded to contemporary problems in the rustic society he portrayed. Virgil's Eclogues had a powerful effect on poets of the Renaissance.
In English poetry the appearance in 1579 of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar brought about a trend towards the pastoral mode.
- Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion, William Browne, William Drummond, John Milton, Andre Demers, Edmund Spenser, William Wordsworth, and Phineas Fletcher all wrote pastoral poetry.
In later centuries, a reaction against the artificialities of the genre, combined with new attitudes to the natural man and the natural scene, resulted in a sometimes bitter injection of reality into the rustic scenes of many poets and novelist.
However, the pastoral elegy survives through Percy Shelley and Matthew Arnold.