Critical Essay | Critical Essay by S. K. Heninger, Jr.

Critical Essay by S. K. Heninger, Jr.

SOURCE: “The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 1, No. 2, April-June 1961, pp. 254-61.

In the following essay, Heninger claims that in the sixteenth century the classical pastoral was “perverted” to express moral, satirical, and sentimental themes, and that this adaptation was the result of a humanist desire to explore real life in a form that was originally developed to reflect the ideal.

When the youthful Alexander Pope had finished his pastorals, he wrote a “Discourse” which offers both an encomium of the pastoral tradition and an apologia for his interpretation of it. He began with a characteristically waspish declaration, made with the confidence and careful balance of impeccable authority:

There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called Pastorals, nor a smaller, than of those which are truly so.¹

With a neo-classical...
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