Georgic and Pastoral

The classical genre of pastoral as translated into English literature has long been ideologically suspect, amounting to an imaginative transmutation of landscape stripped of working figures and signs of strife; in this political context, georgic has supplied the deficiency with its realistic portrayal of difficult labour. Ecologically, too, pastoral has seemed to idealise a static landscape, while georgic has more honestly come to terms with mobile, sometimes hostile environments. This chapter takes an alternative view, suggesting instead that pastoral’s capacity to turn away from the hard life of labour on the land might be reconfigured from a dubiously bourgeois or naïvely utopian aesthetic to a light-touch ecological ideal. Likewise, georgic’s capacity to pause and reflect on the scene of work in a setting that cannot be tamed entirely, but to which the worker and the poet must adapt, is an important counterbalance to the genre’s privileging of heroic human labour. Reading poems by Alexander Pope, Mary Leapor, William Collins, and John Philips, this chapter reassesses georgic and pastoral to examine how each genre offers a version of the careful, humble, patient, or other limited attitudes and minor arts of accommodation to the nonhuman world, amounting to something like an ecological ethics.