Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- 5 Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama
- 6 Dryden and the poetic career
- 7 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (I): from the Restoration to the death of Pope
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 9 Systems satire: Swift.com
- 10 Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry
- 11 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (II): after Pope
- 12 Drama and theatre in the mid and later eighteenth century
- 13 Scottish poetry and regional literary expression
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
10 - Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry
from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- 5 Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama
- 6 Dryden and the poetic career
- 7 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (I): from the Restoration to the death of Pope
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 9 Systems satire: Swift.com
- 10 Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry
- 11 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (II): after Pope
- 12 Drama and theatre in the mid and later eighteenth century
- 13 Scottish poetry and regional literary expression
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
Summary
Thomas Parnell's lines about the pastoral world take us to the heart of an age-old problem. ‘Oft have I read’, he begins, ‘that Innocence retreats / Where cooling streams salute the summer Seats; / Singing at ease she roves the field of flowers / Or safe with shepherds lies among the bowers …’ Having passed through a country fair, however, he had found ‘No Strephon nor Dorinda’, but a motley crew of randy, idle and drunken rustics:
Are these the Virtues which adorn the plain?
Ye bards forsake your old Arcadian Vein,
To sheep, those tender Innocents, resign
The place where swains and nymphs are said to shine;
Swains twice as wicked, Nymphs but half as sage.
Tis sheep alone retrieve the golden age.
Where is pastoral innocence to be found? And how can any modern writer not view Arcadia ironically? By a shift of focus typical of early eighteenth-century satire, the sheep move centre-stage: the incidentals of pastoral become the guardians of its soul. The poet is self-consciously listening to his own bland rhetoric (‘the Virtues which adorn the plain’, etc.) before the final rueful comment emerges – conclusive, yet almost in parenthesis, as if he is turning away from the scene. After two thousand years of pastoral poetry Parnell (d. 1718) can find only one unsullied image remaining, and there seems no more to be said.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 259 - 286Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
References
(ed.), The Singer of the Eclogues. A Study of Virgilian Pastoral. With a New Translation of the Eclogues, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979.Google Scholar
, and (eds.), A Book of English Pastoral Verse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
, ‘Purney Pastoral, and the Polymorphous Perverse’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1994).Google Scholar
, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.Google Scholar
, Theories of Pastoral in England, 1684–1798, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952.Google Scholar
, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
, ‘Discours sur la nature de l'´eglogue’ (1688), trans. , ‘Of Pastorals’, published with Bossu's Treatise of the Epick Poem, London, 1695.Google Scholar
, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks. A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill, ed. , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
, Public Virtue. A Poem in Three Books. I. Agriculture. II. Commerce. III. Arts, London: Dodsley, 1753. (Only Book 1 was published.)Google Scholar
, ‘Organizing Verse: Burke's Reflections and Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, Romanticism 3 (1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Poetry. An Annotated Anthology, Oxford and Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.Google Scholar
, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978.Google Scholar
, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane, London and New Brunswick: RAthlone Press, 2000.Google Scholar
, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Surveying the Frontier of Culture: Pastoralism in Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 26 (1998).Google Scholar
, Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980.Google Scholar
, ‘Christopher Smart's The Hop-Garden and John Philips's Cyder: a Battle of the Georgics? Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Discussions of Authority, Science and Experience’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1999).Google Scholar
, Collected Poems, ed. and , Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989.Google Scholar
, ‘The Georgic at Mid-Eighteenth Century and the Case of Dodsley's Agriculture’, Review of English Studies 54 (2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. and , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Methuen, 1961.Google Scholar
, A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral [1717]; Augustan Reprint Society, no. 11, 1948.Google Scholar
, Dissertatio de Carmine Pastorali, prefixed to his Eclogae Sacrae (1659), translated as ‘A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali’ in Idylliums of Theocritus, trans. . Oxford, 1684.Google Scholar
, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Poetical Works IV. Miscellaneous Poems English and Latin, ed. , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.Google Scholar
[], Five Pastoral Eclogues, The Scenes of which are Suppos'd to lie among the Shepherds, oppress'd by the War in Germany, London: Dodsley, 1745Google Scholar
, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959.Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by