Produced by S.R.Ellison, David Starner, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
Series Two:
Essays on Poetry
No. 4
Thomas Purney, A Full Enquiry into the
True Nature of Pastoral (1717)
With an Introduction by
Earl Wasserman
The Augustan Reprint Society
January, 1948
Price: $1.00
RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles
H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London
Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
by
Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
1948
In the preface to each of his volumes of pastorals (Pastorals. Afterthe simple Manner of Theocritus, 1717; Pastorals. viz. The BashfulSwain: and Beauty and Simplicity, 1717) Thomas Purney rushed intocritical discussions with the breathlessness of one impatient to revealhis opinions, and, after touching on a variety of significant topics,cut himself short with the promise of a future extensive treatiseon pastoral poetry. In 1933 Mr. H.O. White, unable to discover thetreatise, was forced to conclude that it probably had never appeared(The Works of Thomas Purney, ed. H.O. White, Oxford, 1933, p. 111),although it had been advertised at the conclusion of Purney's secondvolume of poetry as shortly to be printed. A copy, probably unique, ofA Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (1717) was, however,recently purchased by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of theUniversity of California, and is here reproduced. Despite the obviousfailure of the essay to influence critical theory, it justifiesattention because it is the most thorough and specific of the remarkablyfew studies of the pastoral in an age when many thought it necessary toimitate Virgil's poetic career, and because it is, in many respects, acontribution to the more liberal tendencies within neoclassic criticism.Essentially, the Full Enquiry is a coherent expansion of the randomcomments collected in the poet's earlier prefaces.
Purney belongs to the small group of early eighteenth-centurycritics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority andpre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logicallyfrom the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; inother words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to thesubjective response. These men, such as Dennis and Addison, werenot searching fo