Theocritus Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas K. Hubbard

Critical Essay by Thomas K. Hubbard

SOURCE: “Poetic Succession and the Genesis of Alexandrian Bucolic,” in The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton, The University of Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 19-44.

In the following excerpt, Hubbard focuses on the stylistic qualities that made Theocritus so influential on his successors.

The quest for a pre-Theocritean form of bucolic poetry has proven unproductive for scholars, whether they have sought it in country songs, religious ritual, archaic lyric, or even Near Eastern traditions.¹ The most that can be found in some of these traditions are occasional strands of pastoral imagery, as was likely also true of Theocritus' influential predecessor Philetas.² It is by now a commonplace of scholarship to declare Theocritus the sole inventor of the bucolic genre. But it may be theoretically misleading to do so, since a genre by definition must be a set of formal expectations that...
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