I too agree that pastoral is not only about poetry - and I certainly would
not set up the jejune thoughts of my 18-year-old self as the last word, or
even my last word, on that subject, but only as one first-hand if perhaps
eccentric perspective on what might appeal to young people in pastoral.
Which is what I understand David to have been asking.
In my case, one of several paths out of the possible sterility of that
point of view proved to be precisely to think about the moral force of
pastoral. (Not, Steven is of course right, that poems are moral agents.
That's a legitimate distinction, but not a simple one: a landmine has no
moral agency, but the genre of object called 'landmines' is not morally
neutral at all given the purpose for their existence. By an analogous
argument, I think it does indeed make sense to suggest that a poetic genre
might be decadent.) To assess a poem solely in terms of whether it 'works'
or not, on the other hand, seems to open the danger of a different kind of
sterility, and in this respect I don't see that the example of Auden works
in the way Steven suggests. Had Auden's poems been morally neutral,
existing only in the valley of their own saying, then he might have
repudiated his own writing of them and the beliefs that inspired him to do
it, but hardly the poems themselves.
Moral arrogation has an opposite fault, which is moral abdication. I do
not understand how it can be the duty of the 'informed student' (informed
by whom?) to pronounce on poetry's moral failures if such questions have
been excluded from discussion by the teacher. Fortunately there is a wide
middle way, trodden by most human beings, between claiming moral
omniscience and ruling the subject out of discussion. As for the pastoral
genre, the double-vision - the simultaneous 'seeing and not seeing' that I
was trying to hint at but that Steven describes far better - surely has
moral implications, albeit ones that change according to context. For
Theocritus, it may have been a way of getting through hard times (whether
we think of it as exquisite irony or something more akin to escapism); at
the Petit Trianon, arguably it helped precipitate the Revolution; in
Ingsoc, they call it doublethink. I'm putting this in a rough-and-ready
way, just to make the point: but while I wouldn't say that morality is
what the teaching of pastoral ought to be about first and foremost, I do
believe that the moral element is not only part of pastoral, but can also
be part of pastoral's attraction for the idealistic young. Step forward,
Edmund Spenser.
Charlie
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Website: www.charlesbutler.co.uk
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