Lovecraft, H P - The Despised Pastoral

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 81.38KB 2 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Despised Pastoral

by H.P. Lovecraft

Among the many and complex tendencies observable in modern poetry, or what answers

for poetry in this age, is a decided but unjust scorn of the honest old pastoral,

immortalised by Theocritus and Virgil, and revived in our own literature by Spencer.

Nor is this unfavorable attitude confined alone to the formal eclogue whose classical

elements are so well described and exemplified by Mr. Pope. Whenever a versifier adorns

his song with the pleasing and innocent imagery of this type of composition, or borrows

its mild and sweet atmosphere, he is forthwith condemned as an irresponsible pedant and

fossil by every little-wit critic in Grub-street.

Modern bards, in their endeavour to display with seriousness and minute verisimilitude

the inward operations of the human mind and emotions, have come to look down upon

the simple description of ideal beauty, or the straightforward presentation of pleasing

images for no other purpose than to delight the fancy. Such themes they deem trivial and

artificial, and altogether unworthy of an art whose design they take to be the analysis and

reproduction of Nature in all her moods and aspects.

But in this belief, the writer cannot but hold that our contemporaries are misjudging the

true province and functions of poesy. It was no starched classicist, but the exceedingly

unconventional Edgar Allen Poe, who roundly denounced the melancholy metaphysicians

and maintained that true poetry has for its first object "pleasure, not truth", and "indefinite

pleasure instead of definite pleasure," intimating that its concern for the dull or ugly

aspects of life is slight ideed. That the American bard and critic was fundamentally just in

his deductions, seems well proved by a comparative survey of those poems of all ages

which have lived, and those which have fallen into deserved obscurity.

The English pastoral, based upon the best models of antiquity, depicts engaging scenes of

Arcadian simplicity, which not only transport the imagination through their intrinsic

beauty, but recall to the scholarly mind the choicest remembrances of classical Greece

and Rome. Though the combination of rural pursuits with polished sentiments and diction

is patently artificial, the beauty is not a whit less; nor do the conventional names, phrases,

and images detract in the least from the quaint agreeableness of the whole. The magic of

this sort of verse is to any unprejudiced mind irresistible, and capable of evoking a more

deliciously placid and refreshing train of pictures in the imagination than may be

obtained from any more realistic species of composition. Every untainted fancy begets

ideal visions of which the pastoral forms a legitimate and artistically necessary reflection.

It is not impossible that the intellectual upheaval attendant upon the present conflict will

bring about a general simplification and rectification of taste, and an appreciation of the

value of pure imaginary beauty in a world so full of actual misery, which may combine to

restore the despised pastoral to its proper station.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - The Despised Pastoral.pdf

共2页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - The Despised Pastoral

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: