Paradox, Place, and Pastoralism in the Works of Theocritus, Virgil, and Thoreau
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v2i4.443Keywords:
cognitive studies of religion, nature religions, Greek and Roman mythology, depth psychology, cultural geography, American literature, pastoral poetryAbstract
That humans have forever longed for return to paradise is axiomatic of pastoralism. While the Greek poet Theocritus is arguably the first to present Arcadia as a paradisal, pastoral place in his Idylls, by going beyond merely addressing the essential contradictions of life and attempting to resolve them in his Eclogues, Virgil advances the pastoral mode. Both works are imbued with a paradoxical sense of longing for the unattainable that has influenced much Western literature and art in the past two thousand years. Indeed, just as Virgil re-visions Theocritus, Henry David Thoreau emulates and then extends Virgil’s pastoral form in Walden. Pastoralism is seen, therefore, as an ever-adaptive perspective that continues to inform today’s artists, poets, and philosophers. By analyzing the mythopoetic aspects of pastoralism, Idylls, Eclogues, and Walden may be understood as mythologies of place that embody soul.References
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———. 1983b. Healing Fiction (Putnam, CT: Spring).
———. 2006. City and Soul (Putnam, CT: Spring).
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———. 1979. The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Berman, M. 2000. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Buell, L. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Eliade, M. 1987 [1959]. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W.R. Trask; New York: Harcourt).
Greenberg, J. 2007a. ‘Walden and the Bhagavad Gita: How-To’s for Navigating Life in a Contradictory World’, American Vedantist 13.3: 8-13.
———. 2007b (unpublished). ‘A Jungian Approach to Walden’.
Hillman, J. 1976. Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial).
———. 1979. ‘An Essay on Pan: A Psychological Introduction to W.H. Roscher’s Ephialtes’, in Pan and the Nightmare: Two Essays (Dallas: Spring): i-lix.
———. 1983a. Archetypal Psychology (Putnam, CT: Spring).
———. 1983b. Healing Fiction (Putnam, CT: Spring).
———. 2006. City and Soul (Putnam, CT: Spring).
Hodder, A.D. 2001. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Jung, C.G. 1971 [1964]. Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell).
Klingner, F. 1961. ‘Das Erste Hirtengedicht Virgils’, in Römische Geisteswelt (Munich, 4th edn): 239-326.
Marx, L. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Marx, S. 1984. Youth against Age: Generational Strife in Renaissance Poetry (New York: Peter Lang).
Moldenhauer, J.J. 1964. ‘The Extra-vagant Maneuver: Paradox in Walden’, The Graduate Journal 6: 132-46.
Nath Kher, I. 1991. ‘The Poetic Vision of Walden and the Idea of Human Freedom in the Bhagavadg?3ta4’, Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin 4: 27-30.
Panofsky, E. 1955. ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning and the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books): 295-320.
Rosenmeyer, T. 1969. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books).
Schneider, R. 2000. ‘Introduction’, in R. Schneider (ed.), Thoreau’s Sense of Place—Essays in American Environmental Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press): 1-12.
Snell, B. 1982 [1953]. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Religion (New York: Dover).
Theocritus. Idylls. Online: http://www.gutenberg.net (trans. C.S. Calverley; accessed March 2007).
Thoreau, H.D. 1980 [1849]. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (ed. C.F. Hovde, W.L. Howarth, and E.H. Witherell; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
———. 1999 [1850]. Walden, or Life in the Woods (New York: Penguin).
Versluis, A. 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Virgil. Eclogues. Online: http://classics.mit.edu//Virgil/eclogue.html (accessed February 2007).
Published
2009-03-17
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Greenberg, J. (2009). Paradox, Place, and Pastoralism in the Works of Theocritus, Virgil, and Thoreau. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2(4), 443-462. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v2i4.443
