bucolic poetry

bucolic poetry or bucolics [bew‐kol‐ik], another term for pastoral poetry, especially for Virgil's Eclogues (42–37 BCE) and later imitations. More loosely, any verse on rustic subjects. See also eclogue, idyll.

bucolic poetry, pastoral poetry.The name ‘bucolic’ is derived from the Greek word for herdsmen, boukoloi, and was first used to describe the poems (known as idylls) of the Greek poet Theocritus, who invented the genre of pastoral poetry. These were imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus, and later and most notably by the Roman poet Virgil (in the Eclogues); it was Virgil who gave the genre its location (Arcadia in Greece), its typical form, and many of the motifs subsequently used by later European pastoral poets. In the typical pastoral poem the herdsmen-poets sing of themselves, their loves, and their music in a stylized Greek landscape with Pan and the nymphs. At its best the artful simplicity of pastoral poetry conceals a subtlety of composition that most appeals to a sophisticated taste able to appreciate its studied remoteness from the realities of a shepherd's life. Many of its features are found in Milton's poem Lycidas (1637). Because of its limited subject-matter and easily recognized conventions pastoral poetry came to be used as a vehicle for allegory or veiled social comment as early as Virgil. See also GENRE and ELEGY.