eclogue - Modern Eclogues

A short dramatic poem, originally with a pastoral setting and theme. Of classical derivation (notably in Theocritus and Virgil), the form was popular in the 16th–17th-c (as Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, 1579), satirized in the 18th-c (eg Gay, Swift), and was adapted to more general purposes by some 20th-c poets (eg Auden, MacNeice).

The ancients referred to individual poems of Virgil's "Bucolica" as "eclogae," (see Eclogues) and the term was used by later Latin poets to refer to their own bucolic poetry, often in imitation of Virgil. The combination of Virgil's influence and the persistence of bucolic poetry through the Renaissance secured "eclogues" as the accepted term for the genre. Later Roman poets who wrote eclogues include Calpurnius and Nemesianus.

Modern Eclogues

In English literature, Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) belongs to the genre (twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year). Alexander Pope produced a series of four eclogues (one for each season of the year) in imitation of Virgil in 1709. The Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega also wrote eclogues in the Virgilian style. In French, Pierre de Ronsard wrote a series of eclogues under the title Les Bucoliques, and Clément Marot also wrote in the genre. In the seventeenth century, collections of eclogues were published by the Polish poets Szymon Szymonowic and Zimorowic. Miklós Radnóti, the Hungarian Jewish poet wrote remarkable eclogues about his tragic era, the Holocaust (he was executed by the fleeing German army some months before the end of WWII). The most prolific modern poet writing eclogues was Louis Macneice. His eclogues included "Eclogue by a five barred gate", "Eclogue for the motherless", "An eclogue for christmas", "Eclogue from Iceland". John Gay ridiculed the eclogues of Ambrose Philips in his Shepherd's Week and Mary Wortley Montagu wrote six "Town Eclogues", substituting the fashionable society of contemporary London for Virgil's rural Arcadia.