Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Texts and abbreviations
- Introduction: “Remedies themselves complain”: pastoral poetry, pastoral criticism
- 1 Bringing it all back home: bucolic and heroic in Theocritus' Idylls
- 2 Si numquam fallit imago: Virgil's revision of Theocritus
- 3 Pastime and passion: the impasse in the Old Arcadia
- 4 Complaints themselves remedy: Marvell's lyrics as problem and solution
- Epilogue Farewell to pastoral: The Shepherd's Week
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
1 - Bringing it all back home: bucolic and heroic in Theocritus' Idylls
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Texts and abbreviations
- Introduction: “Remedies themselves complain”: pastoral poetry, pastoral criticism
- 1 Bringing it all back home: bucolic and heroic in Theocritus' Idylls
- 2 Si numquam fallit imago: Virgil's revision of Theocritus
- 3 Pastime and passion: the impasse in the Old Arcadia
- 4 Complaints themselves remedy: Marvell's lyrics as problem and solution
- Epilogue Farewell to pastoral: The Shepherd's Week
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Too often, Theocritus' poetry has been oversimplified or simply overlooked by readers of English pastoral; the Idylls have regularly been dismissed as a naive point of origin from which Virgil and later poets deviated. Such an approach does a clear disservice to Theocritus himself, and it inevitably limits our view of the genre: by allowing critics to treat as entirely new themes and techniques that are indebted to earlier texts, it helps to obscure not only specific allusions, but one of the primary concerns of much pastoral – the self-conscious focus on the interrelations that exist between “new” poets and their literary models, between present exigencies and the pressures and promises of the past.
That focus is, in fact, central to the Idylls themselves. One of the most important literary debates of Theocritus' day was the disagreement between Callimachus and the Homeric poets over whether contemporary writers should attempt to duplicate the epic scope and style of their predecessors. Theocritus' paradoxical approach to this question exerted a profound influence – both directly and through Virgil's Eclogues – on the poetry of his successors. It is therefore instructive and ultimately necessary for students of later pastoral to return to the Idylls, to consider carefully the problems they pose.
Theocritus' “pastoral” does, of course, differ from that of his successors in at least one major respect. Later poets must come to terms with their distance from earlier pastoral poetry – a distance that may be imaged in their works by their characters' loss of a simpler, more innocent bucolic existence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-ContradictionTheocritus to Marvell, pp. 12 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995