On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 14:53:18 -0700
[log in to unmask] wrote:
>For my money, by far the best answers to the question "what is pastoral
>for"
> are given in Paul Alpers, _What is Pastoral_?
>
> JD Fleming
>
It was an honor, I guess around 1980, to introduce the speaker who had
driven south, in the rain, through the deep and sodden green of Virginia
from Wash. D.C. to speak in Charlottesvile under the title "What Is
Pastoral?" His answer was, "Shepherds speaking to each other" -- whether
competitively, argumentatively, consolatorily, lamentingly, celebratorily,
etc. A few years earlier the speaker had urged one me, at midday in Tad's
Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan, the importance of Empson on double plot in
Some Versions of Pastoral, when I was babbling something about King Lear
(thirty years later he heard me on the double plot in K.Lear, where the
company on the heath allows for a kind of wild pastoral in which the
well-nigh feral court is reflected by the country). Insofar as we believe
that all literature is ironical, in that irony says one thing and means
something opposed, and that literature's figures are never read literally,
"shepherds" can be read as those with a care-giving calling, (rather than
as those with a vested interest in the wool trade, or animal husbandry), as
when their flocks are read as a pastor's congregation. Milton was about 30
when "Lycidas" was published. The ministry of poetry attaches itself to
shepherdhood similarly, and indeed members of the SidneySpenser list may be
understood as shepherds speaking to each other in this honorary sense.
Pastoralists are a kind of "school," (as formerly said), and poets like
Frost, who certainly knows that death has been in Arcadia, are among its
notable graduates right down to In the Clearing--I include the poem on the
rake, which may also be about nuclear weapons, in complete agreement with
those that see pastoral as a vehicle for social critique, its retreats
showing us that you must leave a given world in order to see it as it is.
See Calidore among the shepherds, or Florizell and Perdita in The Winter's
Tale:
This is the prettiest lowborn lass that ever
Ran on the greensward. Nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place. ...
... Good sooth, she is
The queen of curds and cream.
Sannazarro's piscatorials are a potential vehicle in their own right, and
although Walt Kelly presumably had never heard of them, Pogo stands as an
apt example of the uses to which piscatorial can be put. Gone fishin'.
> 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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