I loathe everything to do with The People,’ writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much-discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet’s voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.

This chapter traces the development of Judith Wright’s poetics, outlining her early focus on specific places and their legacies rather than on ideas of nation. It offers close readings of poems like “South of My Days,” “Bullocky,” and “Bora Ring.” The chapter then identifies mid-career attention to interpersonal relations before considering Wright’s growing awareness of settler-colonial privilege, Aboriginal sovereignty, different orders of temporality, and a continued expression of love for the land. The chapter reflects on the impact of Wright’s friendship with Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and analyses “Two Dreamtimes.” It also examines Wright’s decision in 1990 to forego writing poetry in order to embrace environmental activism.

This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

This chapter focuses on musical interpretations of Giambattista Marino’s (1569–1625) pastoral poetry in Monteverdi’s Sixth Book of madrigals from 1614. The pastoral mode gave Monteverdi licence to create imaginary worlds of musical shepherds and nymphs, just as it had given Marino the opportunity to create a web of poetic references reaching back to antiquity. The formal and stylistic experiments found in the pastoral madrigals, or the rime boscherecce, provided Monteverdi fertile ground from which to use musical materials in a similar way. The affinities and, in many cases, the incongruities between the pastoral images and characters in the texts and Monteverdi’s manipulation of them in music created a new kind of listening experience for the audience. It invited them to delight in the unexpected.

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

Chapter 2 treats the early Italianate-poetry that Cervantes wrote for Isabel de Valois (1567, 1568) when he was around twenty years old as serious works composed within the particular cultural and poetic practices of the Habsburg court. In his first sonnet, Cervantes’ speaker develops a conceptual play between the speaking ingenio and the lofty lady through the use of an exalted apostrophe, a key feature of Pastoral Petrarchism that would inflect the subsequent decades of the author’s literary career. The only known copy of this sonnet was preserved in an early seventeenth-century manuscript collection of pastoral and erotic lyric and narrative poetry pertaining to the Habsburg court, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu. This chapter examines and draws upon the manuscript in order to reconstruct the literary environment in which Cervantes wrote, as it was understood by the early modern compiler (a primary source on readership, reception, and genre). Ms. Espagnole 373 also recontextualizes the poetry that Cervantes composed the following year for the untimely death of Isabel on October 3, 1568. This chapter considers Cervantes’ relationship to Giulio Acquaviva while the papal legate was present in the Habsburg court, his journey to Rome, and the Sigura affair.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

Chapter 3 explores how an exemplary amorous biography, a type of vita poetica or literary hagiography, was attributed to el divino Francesco Petrarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Imitatio applied not only to the figures and tropes of the Trionfi and Canzoniere, but also to the figura of the poet as a model or exemplar for the life of an author. After roughly two centuries (1374–1575), Petrarch’s lasting fame became literary immortality like that of ancient authors (Homer and Vergil). From the 1535 alleged rediscovery of Laura’s grave and Alessandro Piccolomini’s 1540 pilgrimage to Petrarch’s tomb, to the various sixteenth-century translations of Petrarch’s poetry, and commentaries made by lyric poets in the front matter to publications, in manuscript poems, and in pastoral fiction, the literary afterlife of the figura of the poet took shape. This chapter reconstructs the figura of the poet as it was imagined, articulated, imitated, and reinvented by sixteenth-century poets writing in Castilian. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Castilianized ingenio (ingenium) had come to define the figura of the poet. This chapter fills in a lacuna (Garcilaso to Góngora) of roughly sixty years which is crucial to Cervantes’ work and studies of early modern poetics.

Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.

This chapter chronicles the development of the short story as a product of the Program Era from its inception in the 1930s up through the contemporary moment, and argues that its history can be understood in terms of the experiences of the college-educated creative class, whose socioeconomic situation is perennially precarious. As shown through illustrations from the Best American Short Stories, two institutions loom large in this history: the New Yorker and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which can stand in for the NYC vs. MFA dialectic that shapes the careers of most American short story writers. It is between these poles that the short story has been negotiated and evaluated during the Program Era. For most writers, it is an apprenticeship form, originally addressed to teachers and students and then to other writers and literary professionals, preparing the field for the novel addressed to the larger reading public.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

Anna Akhmatova is a prominent presence in international canons of war poetry, yet her range and significance as a war poet remains underappreciated. Akhmatova is unique among Russian poets, given the Soviet emphasis on 1917 as historical watershed, in identifying 1914 in hindsight as the start of the ‘real’ twentieth century. This chapter situates Akhmatova’s tragic, patriotic view of war in its contemporary intellectual context, and in that of scholarship on gender and war poetry.It examines key lyrics, focusing on religious and pastoral motifs, and highlights Akhmatova’s distinctive approach through comparison with the poetry of her soldier husband, Nikolai Gumilev.Overall, it argues that the war marked an important transition in Akhmatova’s writing, allowing her to develop the characteristic blending of individual with collective voice – and ethical emphasis on memory and bearing of historical witness – that are commonly associated with her later work and which continue to resonate now.

The poet/painter Isaac Rosenberg‘s poverty, education, and Jewish upbringing made him an outsider, yet this experience equipped him to cope with the unforeseen horror of war in the trenches: ‘I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poetry.’ At first overshadowed by Brooke, Sassoon, and Owen, Rosenberg, whose background and poetic achievement insistently challenged contemporary judgements, increasingly symbolised those outside the established cultural canons. It was the poets who read and absorbed his work; and those of the next war who found in him an alternative voice which spoke to them. In the 1950s/60s that difference of approach, which had seemingly marginalised Rosenberg, now interested younger poets and eventually critics and the wider public. The originality and strength of his poetry were rooted in the struggle with the opposing elements of his life, which did not follow the conventions of any role he played: East End Jew, poet, painter or soldier.

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden both saw action and survived into the late twentieth century as successful men of letters whose styles were quite different. This chapter looks at their literary friendship and compares their work, clarifying where they stand in relation to the Georgians and other war poets, while putting them in a broader cultural perspective. It shows how experience of the trenches led them to twist traditional forms, and examines the stylistic and personal challenges they faced as survivors, their writings ever more retrospective. It argues that Blunden’s complexpoetry may feel archaic but has Modernist elements and has been unjustly neglected by comparison with Sassoon’s more accessible but less subtle verse. With close analysis and comparison, and some redefining of key texts, the chapter emphasises their contrasting approaches: Blunden the troubled pastoralist, exploring profounder shades of meaning; Sassoon deliberately ‘anti-poetic’, but with satirical designs on us.

Chapter 3 redirects the scholarly trend of characterizing Spenser’s works as defined by personal and political discontent, and it instead examines their relationship to sixteenth-century models of contentedness. This study of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume demonstrates that Spenser privileges a situational contentment. In Book I, neither Red Cross nor Una can maintain contentment at all times, but the emotion punctuates experiences like productive sadness and pious anger, and it protects against overly destructive passions. While Book I presents contentedness coexisting with other emotions, Mother Hubberds Tale imagines an uneasy alliance between contentment and complaint. Finally, through the character of Melibee in Book VI, Spenser makes his most explicit case for contentment, yet it is embedded in an episode that emphasizes the sway of sexual desire and the intense threat it can pose when unrestrained. In his last concerted representation of contentment, Spenser emphasizes its appeal and fragility. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works.