eclogue, a short pastoral poem, usually in dialogue, on the subject of rural life and the society of shepherds, depicting rural life as free from the complexity and corruption of more civilized life. The eclogue first appeared in the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 310–250 bc), generally recognized as the inventor of pastoral poetry. The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 bc) adopted the form for his 10 Eclogues, or Bucolics.
The eclogue, along with other pastoral forms, was revived during the Renaissance by the Italians Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Battista Spagnoli (Mantuanas), whose neo-Latin Eclogues (1498) were read and imitated for more than a century.
Edmund Spenser’s series of 12 eclogues, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), is considered the first outstanding pastoral poem in English. By the 17th century less formal eclogues were written by such poets as Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell. Marvell’s “Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn” (1681) climaxed the eclogue tradition of combining rural freshness with learned imitation. In the 18th century English poets began to use the eclogue for ironic verse on nonpastoral subjects, such as Jonathan Swift’s “A Town Eclogue. 1710. Scene, The Royal Exchange.”
The poets of the Romantic period rebelled against the artificiality of the older pastoral, and the eclogue fell from favour. The form has occasionally been revived for special purposes by modern poets, as in Louis MacNeice’s ironic eclogues in his Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949). See also idyll.