SOURCE: "Menalcas' Song: The Meaning of Art and Artifice in Gay's Poetry," in JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LXV, 1966, pp. 662-79.

In the following essay, Battestin calls for a new understanding of Gay's use of the pastoral in his poetry, suggesting that Gay's skill with form and artifice reflect an Augustan aesthetic akin to that of Pope.

For Gay, no less than Pater, art was necessary because life was deficient in form. This is the essential point, not only about the manner of Gay's verse—that "delicate and sophisticated craftsmanship," as Professor Sutherland has remarked, producing objets as precious and frail as Chelsea china¹—but about Gay's meaning as well. His best known poems—the Fables, The Shepherd's Week, Rural Sports, Trivia—are characteristically witty and finely wrought, apparently frivolous and fragile. It is perhaps not surprising that Dr. Johnson should dismiss their author as...