Georgic

Abstract With roots in Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil’s Georgics, and the Bible, seventeenth-century English georgic was a diverse, flexible genre. Recognition of the diversity and flexibility of early modern English georgic has served to correct a long-standing literary-historical tendency to regard the genre as if it were buried in barren ground until its eighteenth-century efflorescence. A less rigidly imitative view of seventeenth-century georgic, one neither narrowly fixed on the Virgilian model nor disconnected from it, reveals a richly varied landscape of works markedly different in scope and style: vast and copious, like Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion; classically restrained, like Jonson’s estate poems; loco-reflective, like Denham’s Cooper’s Hill; exploratory and extravagant, like Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’; stately and historical, like Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis; and universal and intimate, like Milton’s Paradise Lost.