Theocritus: Master of the Pastoral
Professor Kuin kindly pointed me to Josh Canning's blog (he's in the Mixed 1 Group) when he read in my last blog that I would be writing something on Theocritus. Josh has also written about Theocritus, and his blog includes one of the Idyls. The information for this blog of mine, was taken finally from two sources, first, Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, A. Lang, Macmillan: London, 1889, which also includes translation of Theocritus' Idyls, and secondly, from : Theocritus in English Literature, Robert Thomas Kerlin, J.P. Bell Company, Lynchburg, VA, 1910. I found so much information on Theocritus that, although this blog is lengthy, it is basically an overview. His influence, as seen by the number of poets noted below, has been enormous, and it has been well worth the time spent doing some research into this man's life and work.
To begin, I found some quotes referring to Theocritus, as follows:
July, 1880, the Saturday Review: "He [Theocritus] has, both directly and through his many imitators, exercised an influence upon modern poetry and painting the importance of which it is difficult to overrate."
The Academy, March 2, 1901 speaks thus of his influence:
"Theocritus is not merely a great poet, he is a source, an ancestor; a whole species of poetry descends from him - the pastoral. His is a beloved figure - perhaps the sweetest name and fame in the stern literature of antiquity."
The Spectator, Oct. 2, 1880 said: "Every student of literature must wish to know something of the poet whose inspiration has descended to Virgil, Clément Marot, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold…A host of passages in poetry gain added value, if recognized as allusions to Theocritus or reminiscences of him."
Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse. His boyhood was spent in his native island where shepherd-life and such scenes as he afterwards pictured in his pastorals were under his observation.
At about twenty years of age he was in the school of poetry and criticism of Philetas, in the island of Cos (and this is where he matured as a poet). Here he remained possibly about ten years, meanwhile beginning his career as an author. Idyll 7, the ever charming Song of the Harvest-Home, doubtless gives us a glimpse of this period in which he and his piping comrades sometimes masked as shepherds and sang their pastorals. As for Philetas, his master, his extant fragments show him to have been a pastoral poet; and Cos was, because of him, a haunt of the Muses.
The years from 280 to 275 (from 30-35) were spent in his native Sicily. He abandoned Syracuse for Alexandria. In this city, then at the height of its literary activity, Theocritus remained until 270 when he returned to Cos. After a period of residence there, perhaps he came back to the island of his birth, there to spend his last years, but of this we have no certain knowledge.
Perennial sunlight floods the poems of Theocritus. His birthplace was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been 'breathed on by the rural Pan,' and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air of the forests and the coast. Thanks to the mountainous regions of Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams, thanks also the hills of the interior, the populous island never lost the charm of nature. The character of the people too, was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of Sicily. We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems, though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown.
Theocritus' music was nearly all within one metre - the dactylic hexameter. Theocritus, therefore, preserves the principles of unity with diversity.
Theocritus exhibits two qualities which, if not absolutely new in literature (as certainly they were not), were new in their force and their intention as they appear in his pastoral songs. These were a passion for nature and a passion for humanity - not, however, such a passion for nature as expressed itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, nor such a passion for humanity as expressed itself in the rhapsodies of Shelly. He had not the depth of reflection of the one nor the vision of the other. His passions, therefore, were far simpler than theirs - a sweet delight in natural objects, in trees and birds and flowers, brooks, hills, and the beasts that haunt them. The other is Shakespearean - a broad, a universal sympathy with humanity, but particularly with peasants, in whom the native elements were yet to be found virile, healthy, and definite. It is largely because of these two marked and pre-eminent qualities of his genius that he has so greatly appealed to poets since Wordsworth. It is here that he has been allied with English realism and romanticism.
It is because of Theocritus' attitude toward the world, his bright, cheery, optimistic outlook upon things, his turning from the aritficial, pampered, over-civilized life of cities and palaces to the native ways and walks of primitive men - because of his 'Hellenism', (or his paganism), which is naturalism, that he has such an attraction for the spirits most finely touched of the last one hundred years. From the time of Wordsworth, he has been one of the most admired and most attractive of the Greek poets to all 'Hellenists'.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century particularly there was a turning to Theocritus by the most Hellenistic poets of England and America. In the first half of that century we have some admirers of him as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Milman, Alford, Landor, and Tennyson. Then later we have, in England, Matthew Arnold, Palgrave, Calverley, Edwin Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Gosse, Dobson, Lang, Henley, Symonds, Lefroy, Johnson, Zangwill, and William Morris; in America, Stoddard, Stedman, Taylor, Mitchell, Egan, Thompson, Burroughs, Scollard, Sherman, Mifflin, Mrs. Fields, Mabie, Miller, and Jane Minot Sedgwick. These were writers for whom things Greek have an attraction. They are Hellenists, in different degrees.
Bosanquet, in his History of Aesthetic, notes his [Theocritus'] relation to romanticism in these words: "Nothing could be more profoundly suggestive than this [the birth of pastoral poetry of the change which was coming over the world. That conscious self-assertion of individual feeling which has been called sentimental or romantic finds expression, still simple and healthy, in the Theocritean Idyll. When poetic fancy is colored at once by the yearning of passion, the charms of the country, the sense of a beauty in art and song, and the humors of a busy and splendid town, we shall not be far wrong in inferring that man is seeking nature because he already feels that he is parted from it. A contrast of this kind is implied in all distinctions between the ancient and the modern spirit. Theocritus indeed, is but at the starting point of the long and eventful course which romanticism had before it. In him there is no sense of unattainable depths and inexpressible meanings; there is merely the trace of a new sensitiveness in the imagination which indicates the germ of a new longing in the heart…Within a hundred years after Theocritus the first true love romance of known literature was written in the Argonautica of Appollonius Rhodius."
To begin, I found some quotes referring to Theocritus, as follows:
July, 1880, the Saturday Review: "He [Theocritus] has, both directly and through his many imitators, exercised an influence upon modern poetry and painting the importance of which it is difficult to overrate."
The Academy, March 2, 1901 speaks thus of his influence:
"Theocritus is not merely a great poet, he is a source, an ancestor; a whole species of poetry descends from him - the pastoral. His is a beloved figure - perhaps the sweetest name and fame in the stern literature of antiquity."
The Spectator, Oct. 2, 1880 said: "Every student of literature must wish to know something of the poet whose inspiration has descended to Virgil, Clément Marot, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold…A host of passages in poetry gain added value, if recognized as allusions to Theocritus or reminiscences of him."
Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse. His boyhood was spent in his native island where shepherd-life and such scenes as he afterwards pictured in his pastorals were under his observation.
At about twenty years of age he was in the school of poetry and criticism of Philetas, in the island of Cos (and this is where he matured as a poet). Here he remained possibly about ten years, meanwhile beginning his career as an author. Idyll 7, the ever charming Song of the Harvest-Home, doubtless gives us a glimpse of this period in which he and his piping comrades sometimes masked as shepherds and sang their pastorals. As for Philetas, his master, his extant fragments show him to have been a pastoral poet; and Cos was, because of him, a haunt of the Muses.
The years from 280 to 275 (from 30-35) were spent in his native Sicily. He abandoned Syracuse for Alexandria. In this city, then at the height of its literary activity, Theocritus remained until 270 when he returned to Cos. After a period of residence there, perhaps he came back to the island of his birth, there to spend his last years, but of this we have no certain knowledge.
Perennial sunlight floods the poems of Theocritus. His birthplace was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been 'breathed on by the rural Pan,' and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air of the forests and the coast. Thanks to the mountainous regions of Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams, thanks also the hills of the interior, the populous island never lost the charm of nature. The character of the people too, was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of Sicily. We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems, though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown.
Theocritus' music was nearly all within one metre - the dactylic hexameter. Theocritus, therefore, preserves the principles of unity with diversity.
Theocritus exhibits two qualities which, if not absolutely new in literature (as certainly they were not), were new in their force and their intention as they appear in his pastoral songs. These were a passion for nature and a passion for humanity - not, however, such a passion for nature as expressed itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, nor such a passion for humanity as expressed itself in the rhapsodies of Shelly. He had not the depth of reflection of the one nor the vision of the other. His passions, therefore, were far simpler than theirs - a sweet delight in natural objects, in trees and birds and flowers, brooks, hills, and the beasts that haunt them. The other is Shakespearean - a broad, a universal sympathy with humanity, but particularly with peasants, in whom the native elements were yet to be found virile, healthy, and definite. It is largely because of these two marked and pre-eminent qualities of his genius that he has so greatly appealed to poets since Wordsworth. It is here that he has been allied with English realism and romanticism.
It is because of Theocritus' attitude toward the world, his bright, cheery, optimistic outlook upon things, his turning from the aritficial, pampered, over-civilized life of cities and palaces to the native ways and walks of primitive men - because of his 'Hellenism', (or his paganism), which is naturalism, that he has such an attraction for the spirits most finely touched of the last one hundred years. From the time of Wordsworth, he has been one of the most admired and most attractive of the Greek poets to all 'Hellenists'.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century particularly there was a turning to Theocritus by the most Hellenistic poets of England and America. In the first half of that century we have some admirers of him as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Milman, Alford, Landor, and Tennyson. Then later we have, in England, Matthew Arnold, Palgrave, Calverley, Edwin Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Gosse, Dobson, Lang, Henley, Symonds, Lefroy, Johnson, Zangwill, and William Morris; in America, Stoddard, Stedman, Taylor, Mitchell, Egan, Thompson, Burroughs, Scollard, Sherman, Mifflin, Mrs. Fields, Mabie, Miller, and Jane Minot Sedgwick. These were writers for whom things Greek have an attraction. They are Hellenists, in different degrees.
Bosanquet, in his History of Aesthetic, notes his [Theocritus'] relation to romanticism in these words: "Nothing could be more profoundly suggestive than this [the birth of pastoral poetry of the change which was coming over the world. That conscious self-assertion of individual feeling which has been called sentimental or romantic finds expression, still simple and healthy, in the Theocritean Idyll. When poetic fancy is colored at once by the yearning of passion, the charms of the country, the sense of a beauty in art and song, and the humors of a busy and splendid town, we shall not be far wrong in inferring that man is seeking nature because he already feels that he is parted from it. A contrast of this kind is implied in all distinctions between the ancient and the modern spirit. Theocritus indeed, is but at the starting point of the long and eventful course which romanticism had before it. In him there is no sense of unattainable depths and inexpressible meanings; there is merely the trace of a new sensitiveness in the imagination which indicates the germ of a new longing in the heart…Within a hundred years after Theocritus the first true love romance of known literature was written in the Argonautica of Appollonius Rhodius."
posted by maggiesong at 10:34 PM
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