Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
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Description
During the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor.
ISBN
ISBN-13: 9781684480470; ISBN-10: 1684480477
Publication Date
2019
Publisher
Bucknell University Press
City
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Keywords
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; English poetry -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Peace in literature; Criticism, interpretation, etc; faculty
Disciplines
Literature in English, British Isles
Repository Citation
Schoenberger, Melissa, "Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English,
1650-1750" (2019). Holy Cross Bookshelf. 48.
https://crossworks.holycross.edu/hc_books/48