Interesting discussion - I don't know of any dramatic advance on
Wordsworth on this subject; maybe someone else does? (Ponge?)
"pastoral" used today cannot help but connote "conservative pastoral",
that widely-publicized description of British poetry; I think this phrase
was meant to suggest glossy National Trust guides and other things that
seem as irritating as possible to urban street-dwellers.
Which is a vital theme in itself but maybe irrelevant to the seriousness
and centrality of what Wordsworth proposed, which would seem to me to
extend to all senses and to all external nature, regardless of context,
drizzle and fumes.
The only appropriate use of "pastoral" now, it seems to me, is to
characterize a cultural "appropriation" of nature, e.g. Monet's water-
lilies as pictured on my new CapitalOne card, or a photo of a verdant
grove beneath a red cliff on a full-page ad for BP. But the real shape of
the country, and the city, are something different from that. Something
not contemplated at all, if possible (it's better for the biotech
companies).
Religious poetry is religious if you think it is. Personally I don't see
any correlation whatever between a poem that seems devotional or reverent
in a living way (groping for phrases here...) and the professions of faith
of writers. Ashbery is my modern religious poet.
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