Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral

"Most readers think of pastoral as a simple form which espouses a single, generally primitivistic, ideal. Yet the pastoral tradition in the Renaissance was extraordinarily complex and varied. Mr. Cullen's book sheds new light on its many facets by focusing on the work of two of the greatest English pastoralists, Edmund Spenser and Andrew Marvell. Pastoral could, and indeed often did, hold apparently contradictory attitudes in suspension. It also lent itself to a number of opposite uses and ideas: it could celebrate the simple life, it could also disparage it as boorish and crude; it could attack the corruption of the city, while displaying a nostalgia for city life; it could satirize great leaders, it could also praise them; and it could portray the shepherd's experience in love as comic or tragic. Mr. Cullen has identified two distinct trends in pastoral poetry-- the classical or Arcadian, which celebrates the city as well as the country, the statesman as well as the shepherd, and the Mantuanesque, which equates the shepherd's life with contemplation and the spirit and considers everything else worldly and sinful. Having traced these divergent traditions in major pastoral works from Theocritus to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and the pastoral lyrics of Marvell. By showing how they took advanatge of the multiple possibilities of the genre, he expands and enriches the traditional view of both poets." -Publisher.