idyl

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Wikipedia.

idyl

(ī`dəl), short poem. The ancient idyls, especially those of Bion and Moschus, were intended as little selections in the style of such longer poems as elegies or epics. There are 10 famous idyls by the Greek TheocritusTheocritus
, fl. c.270 B.C., Hellenistic Greek poet, b. Syracuse. The history of the pastoral begins with him, and in him the form seems to have reached its height. His poetic style is finished and at times artificial, but the bucolic characters in his idyls seem alive.
..... Click the link for more information. , and, since some of them dealt with pastoral or rural scenes, the term idyl came to be restricted to gently flowing, artistic pieces on rural subjects. In the 19th cent., Alfred Tennyson in his Idylls of the King used the term rather in its looser original sense than in the later restricted pastoral meaning. For idyls in their bucolic sense, see pastoralpastoral,
literary work in which the shepherd's life is presented in a conventionalized manner. In this convention the purity and simplicity of shepherd life is contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the court or the city.
..... Click the link for more information. .

idyll

(sometimes US), idyl

1. a poem or prose work describing an idealized rural life, pastoral scenes, etc.

2. any simple narrative or descriptive piece in poetry or prose

3. a piece of music with a calm or pastoral character

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Mentioned in ?

References in periodicals archive ?

Moreover, her Mary Idyl narrates the majority of the novel with a voice "emanating from [an] atypical bod[y] and experience although the narration is also interrupted at key points by an unnamed, presumably able-bodied speaker who admires Mary and wants to persuade her to share her story with the world (Cassuto 230).

"What mighty transformations!": disfigurement and self-improvement in Emma May Buckingham's A Self-Made Woman

This entirely fits with Larcom's dedication of Idyl of Work:

Lucy Larcom and the poetics of child labour

Six months of preparation and experiment were required for An Idyl to come to performance.

Herkomer's legacy to Craig and the new stagecraft

This summer is, to quote Tate's early poem "Idyl", "the eucharist of death" ([1926] 1977b: 10): it is the natural world as a profane sacrament.

"Cold pastoral": irony and the eclogue in the poetry of the southern fugitives

Gesner's beautiful Idyl of 'The First Navigator', supplied Sestini with the story, in all its details; but he versified it with surprising facility: and, as far as I could judge, with great spirit and elegance.

Poetic improvisation in the nineteenth century: Giuseppe Regaldi and Giannina Milli

(20.) John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyl, a poem of more than 750 lines, was first published in book form in Boston in 1866.

Grounded perceptions: land and value in two plays of the New England decline

"We successfully negotiated with the owner of DIMO assets for the acquisition of idyl equipment, which arrived in July of 2003," said Veerman.

Importers, distributors and producers greet New Year with guarded optimism; plummeting dollar made 2004 a buyer's market and kept check on prices of imported products sold in Europe. Domestic flatfish producers, however, are still being pinched by quotas

After a rather expansive opening movement in [??], the slow movement ("Idyl") opens with a serene and not-so-different melody in [??].

Clara Kathleen Rogers

This is an updating--with book replacing the languorous girl's hand mirror--of the narcissistic fireside idyl of The Golden Days from 1944-45 (111).

Painted readers, narrative regress

Sassower's idyl attributes to faculty an extraordinary wisdom that surpasses even that of our founding fathers:

A Sanctuary of Their Own: Intellectual Refugees in the Academy. (Review Essay)

(10.) Klaus Martens, "Versions of the Epic Idyl: A Genre's Intercultural Migrations by Translation," in Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed.

The Universal Hiawatha

Part 2, |The Mythopoeic Period 1833-89', offers its share of |high' literary samples, notably Helen Hunt Jackson's angry A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881), Mark Twain's wonderfully vernacular Roughing It (1899), and a run of pieces complete in themselves like Bret Harte's wry, anti-heroic |The Idyl of Red Gulch' (1870), Stephen Crane's mini-western |The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky' (1898) and Willa Cather's Kansas Civil War story |The Sculptor's Funeral' (from her Collected Stories, 1905).