The Princeton Poetry & Poetics's entry on 'pastoral' divides into two
sections, 'History' and then 'Theory', the former begins 'The p. is a
fictionalized imitation of rural life, usually the image of an imaginary
Golden Age ...... sometimes sentimental and romantic, but sometimes
satirical and political.' while the latter section, bringing together both
considerations, ends 'Blair's essay,' (that is 'Lectures on Belles
Lettres' - 1783, Hugh Blair) 'along with Wordsworth's 'Michael' (which
exemplifies much of Blair's theory) , ends serious consideration of the p.
After that poem and Blair's essay, the genre belongs to the academics'.
It is certainly of interest to note the psychological and political links of
some more recent poetry and analysis with pastoral but to perpetuate the
genre term is, I'd suggest, somewhat blurring definition. I side more
towards the viewpoint expounded here by Mark Weiss although Chris Jones'
points about landscape and nostalgia are valuable but I'd suggest that
'pastoral' is a limiting reference in their context. Ironically, as this
debate has developed, I've been reading Peter Carey very un-pastoral 'True
History of the Ned Kelly Gang', where landscape holds no cuddly welcome nor
is implied social critique bolstered by any rural simplicity or virtue.
Nostalgia for a Golden Age certainly does permeate Marx's system, but it
weakens it, for Marx the Golden Era was Classical Greece - slave-owning
sexist would-be Imperial Hellas. Blake's reaction to Greece was a very
different one.
It is hard not to suspect that the link of nostalgia and idyll in pastoral
indicate a psychological reality - the memory of childhood security.
JN
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