The originator of the pastoral was the Greek poet Theocritus, who in the third century B.C. wrote poems representing the life of Sicilian shepherds.
("Pastor" is Latin for "shepherd.") Virgil later imitated Theocritus in his Latin Eclogues, and in doing so established the enduring model for the traditional pastoral: a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet's
nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting.
The conventions that hundreds of later poets imitated from Virgil's imitations of Theocritus include a shepherd
reclining under a spreading beech tree and meditating the rural muse, or pip-
ing as though he would ne'er grow old, or engaging in a friendly singing con-
test, or expressing his good or bad fortune in a love affair, or grieving over the death of a fellow shepherd.
From this last type developed the pastoral elegy, which persisted long after the other traditional types had lost their popularity.
Other terms often used synonymously with pastoral are idyll, from the title
of Theocritus' pastorals; eclogue (literally, "a selection"), from the title of Virgil's pastorals; and bucolic poetry, from the Greek word for "herdsman."
Classical poets often described the pastoral life as possessing features of
the mythical golden age. Christian pastoralists combined the golden age of pagan fable with the Garden of Eden in the Bible, and also exploited the reli-
gious symbolism of "shepherd" (as applied to the ecclesiastical or parish "pastor," and to the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd) to give many pastoral poems a Christian range of reference.
In the Renaissance the traditional pas-
toral was also adapted to diverse satirical and allegorical uses.
Edmund Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1579), which popularized the mode in English poetry, included most of the varieties of pastoral poems current in that period.
Such was the attraction of the pastoral dream that Renaissance writers in-
corporated it into various other literary forms.
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1581-84) was a long pastoral romance written in an elaborately artful prose.
(Arcadia was a mountainous region of Greece which Virgil substituted for Theocritus' Sicily as his idealized pastoral milieu.) There was also the pastoral lyric (Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"), and the pastoral drama.
John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess is an example of this
last type, and Shakespeare's As You Like It, based on the contemporary pastoral romance Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge, is set in the forest of Arden, a green refuge from the troubles and complications of ordinary life where all enmities are reconciled, all problems resolved, and the course of true love made to run smooth.
The last important series of traditional pastorals, and an extreme instance
of their calculated and graceful display of high artifice, was Alexander Pope's
Pastorals (1709). Five years later John Gay, in his Shepherd's Week, wrote a parody of the type by applying its elegant formulas to the crudity of actual rustic manners and language, and by doing so, inadvertently showed later poets the way to the seriously realistic treatment of rural life.
In 1783 George Crabbe published The Village. Wordsworth's title for his realistic rendering of a rural tragedy in 1800: "Michael, A Pastoral Poem."
In recent decades the term "pastoral" has been expanded in various ways.
William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, identified as pastoral any work which opposes simple to complicated life, to the advantage of the former: the simple life may be that of the shepherd, the child, or the working man.
In Empson's view this literary mode serves as an oblique way to criticize the values and hierarchical class structure of the society of its time.
Empson accordingly applies the term to works ranging from Andrew Marvell's seventeenth-century poem "The Garden" to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonder-land and the modern proletarian novel.
Other critics apply the term "pastoral" to any work which represents a withdrawal to a place apart that is close to the elemental rhythms of nature, where the protagonist achieves a new perspective on the complexities, frustrations, and conflicts of the social world.
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