Pastoral cannot be form without content, or a vehicle without a tenor, if it
is found not only in verse eclogues and briefl lyrics addressed by
passionate shepherds to their loves (perhaps not altogether pastoral, until
Milton, Arcades 104, "Bring your Flocks, and live with us"), but also in
pastoral drama about faithful and sad shepherds and green worlds as you like
them, pastoral fiction in Arcadian prose, pastoral novellae about escape
into one world to find refuge from another with Marcella in Don Quixote Pt.
I, pastoral romance with Daphnis and Choloe and afternoons with fauns;
indeed, a persistent motif here is the adoption of shepherds' guise or
costume (as in the example of Louis XVI's queen), as if to tell us that
pastoral contains a dream of alternatives, and an at least superficially
anti-ironical recovery of (hermeneutical) innocence, though both pastoral
elegy and urban pastoral (John Gay) might see through that. On some of the
theme (3 rys. before I sat in his first Dante class of the 1960 Fall
semester) Renato Poggioli published "The Oaten Flute" in the Harvard Libarry
Bulletin (1957), which see: it's still a good starting-point, I guess.
Again, when I said the terrestrial paradise in Dante is a transcendental
pastoral (or commences as one), I had in mind the genre of the
pastourelle--Dante's meeting with Matelda, one could argue, has that form as
part of its content (or at least its literary context).
On Sun, 8 Jun 2008 16:15:26 -0700
[log in to unmask] wrote:
> It seems to me that the problem, if there is one, is not at all with
>poetry
> of no content. The problem, rather, is with poetry of content. For (1)
> content is accidental to the substance of poetry (in the sense that poetry
> can be about anything), and (2) since poetry is always about content
>anyway,
> focussing on the poetry brings content along willy-nilly. Thus the smart
> move is, indeed, poetry about poetry. Or, broadening the terms slightly,
> representation about representation; aboutness about aboutness.
>
> Now, aboutness requires a substratum: the inscription requires a physical
> basis. Nature both embodies, and represents, substratum. Pastoral is about
> this particular department of the phenomenon of aboutness: the
>relationship
> between aboutness and its own conditions of material possibility.
> (Love-poems in tree-bark, etc.) Entailed in this relationship is a
> manifestation of being that has to be enacted in order to be understood.
>And
> thus we go round and round and round. That's pastoral. "Until the woods
>them
> answer, and the echo ring."
>
> JD Fleming
>
> On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 12:14:34 -0400 [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> Several years ago, I organized an online discussion of Virgil's
>> Eclogues; we got through #5. If anyone's curious, the record of our
>> conversation is still available here:
>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eclogues/messages/1. Last spring I tried
>> again, with some undergraduates. We finished this time, in the sense
>> that we read all ten poems. But I didn't feel that we'd got IN, if you
>> know what I mean, and I was grateful when we moved on to the Georgics.
>>
>> This summer, I'm trying the Eclogues again, and I'd like to share
>> something that's bugging me, in hope that someone can set me my feet
>> back on the path of righteousness. Are you ready for it? Virgil's
>> Eclogues (and Spenser's SC) are all about poetry. How very meta! (Q: Why
>> are University of Chicago students smarter than Harvard students? A:
>> Everything Harvard can do, Chicago can do meta.) What's wrong with that?
>> There are, it seems to me, at least two objections which meta-poetry is
>> open to:
>>
>> 1. It has no content. A dog chasing his own tale is fun to watch, but he
>> can't really eat it. To change the metaphor, it's sterile. To change the
>> metaphor again, it's cut off from real life.
>>
>> 2. Sure, there is no "singing school but studying / Monuments of its own
>> magnificence." But that (the art world of Byzantium) is no country for
>> young men. What do young men -- the kind who are supposed to write
>> pastoral -- know about poetry? Who but a young poet would write twaddle
>> like this? "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's
>> affections and the truth of the Imagination." Oh please. Double oh
>> please. License to spew thee out of my mouth. The heart is deceitful
>> above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?
>>
>> Before I go on, let me say this in favor of youth. If you read English
>> history, you get the impression that having a boy king is a bad thing.
>> But if you read Bible history, a boy king can be wonderful, especially
>> when you need a reformer (like Josiah). Young people are willing to rock
>> the boat. They don't measure (because they haven't experienced yet) the
>> real cost of their actions. They aren't invested yet in the status quo.
>> They can be uncompromising, because they haven't themselves been
>> compromised yet by the World. They wield a terrible, SWIFT sword. That
>> kind of thing terrifies old men -- terrifies and shames them.
>>
>> This doesn't explain, though, why young people should be drawn to one of
>> the harder tasks there is in poetry, which writing pastoral is. First,
>> you have to master the low/thin/paired-down style. That's hard.
>> Shakespeare could do it ("Never, never, never"), but not until his
>> forties. Second, if poetry is going to be your subject, you have to know
>> something about poetry that is worth saying. On the one hand, the world
>> of poetry seems brave to young people, because it is new to them; that's
>> something. On the other hand, while they may be passionate about Poetry,
>> they usually haven't read very many poems; their tastes tend to be
>> narrow. Mine were, anyway. If it wasn't romantic/Romantic, I wasn't
>> interested. Satire was lost on me. I liked comedy, but I didn't value
>> it. Which brings me back to problem #2, what do young people know about
>> poetry?
>>
>> O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this
> death?
>>
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
>> English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
>> East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>
>
> James Dougal Fleming
> Department of English
> Simon Fraser University
> 778-782-4713
> cell: 604-290-1637
>
> Nicht deines, einer Welt.
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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