The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Eclogue

a type of idyll. An eclogue is a genre scene, usually a love scene, of conventional pastoral life. It may be written in narrative or dramatic form. In classical literature no distinction was made between the idyll, for example, those of Theocritus, and the eclogue, for example, Vergil’s Bucolics. Writers of the 18th-century classical school considered that the idyll required more emotion, and the eclogue more action; such were the first Russian eclogues, by A. P. Sumarokov. However, the distinction was not strictly observed. The genre had become obsolete by the early 19th century.

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References in periodicals archive

He resorted to 'May', an eclogue whose doctrinal substance is summarised in E.

Ramist Dialectic, Poetic Examples, and the Uses of Pastoral in Abraham Fraunce's The Shepherds' Logic

Agonistic poetics and Vergil's third Eclogue. In Skoie, M & Bjornstad-Velasquez, S (eds.) Pastoral and the humanities: Arcadia reinscribed, 107-114.

A translation of Vergil's third Eclogue into Afrikaans

Although scholars have focused on Encina's concerns with respect to his recognition as poet and then criticism of the Duke for his lack of recompense within the second half of the eclogue, one could argue that these concerns begin, in fact, in the opening section of the play.

Juan del Encinas egloga representada en la noche de la natividad: gift giving in search of recognition and recompense

He refers to himself as the poet "who toyed with shepherds' songs" and sets his poetic "seal" or sphragis on the Georgics by making its final line repeat the first line of the Eclogues. Thus identifying himself as the author of the Eclogues, Virgil introduces the notion of a poetic career to serve as a prospective as well as retrospective framework for the Georgics.

Pushkin's "To Ovid" and Virgil's Georgics

(14) In other words, the woods (silvae) in the opening lines of Eclogue 4 may describe poetic content; but they also suggest a mode of literary production that is intimately connected to textuality.

Linus as a figure for pastoral poetics in Vergil's Eclogues

This essay argues that Dante's resuscitation of the Virgilian pastoral in his Latin letter to the Bolognese proto-humanist Giovanni del Virgilio was the proximate model for Petrarch's own foray into the pastoral mode in the first eclogue of his Bucolicum Carmen and in the epistle that glosses it (Familiares 10.4).

Zygmunt Baranski and Theodore Cachey, eds. Petrarch & Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition

NOTE: The last two lines of this poem come from Virgil's Eclogue

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