Georgics

Prominent themes of the second book include agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, often described in violent terms, and the ages of Saturn and Jupiter.

The poems invoke Greek and Italian gods and address such issues as Virgil's intention to honour both Caesar and his patron Maecenas, as well as his lofty poetic aspirations and the difficulty of the material to follow.

The intriguing idea has been put forth by one scholar that Virgil also drew on the rustic songs and speech patterns of Italy at certain points in his poem, to give portions of the work a distinct, Italian character.

"[9] Likewise, David West remarks in his discussion of the plague in the third book, Virgil is "saturated with the poetry of Lucretius, and its words, phrases, thought and rhythms have merged in his mind, and become transmuted into an original work of poetic art.

Instead, the Orpheus episode is here understood as an integral part of the poem that articulates or encapsulates its ethos by reinforcing many ideas or reintroducing and problematizing tensions voiced throughout the text.

As a careful study by Ward Briggs goes a long way to show, the repetition of lines in the Georgics and the Aeneid is probably an intentional move made by Virgil, a poet given to a highly allusive style, not, evidently, to the exclusion of his own previous writings.

Additionally, some of these reproduced lines are themselves adapted from works by Virgil's earlier literary models, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, Ennius' Annals, and Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.

[16] The work on Georgics was launched when agriculture had become a science and Varro had already published his Res rusticae, on which Virgil relied as a source—a fact already recognized by the commentator Servius.

[citation needed] John Dryden’s 1697 poetic translation of Virgil's Georgics sparked a renewed interest in agricultural poetry and country life amongst the more educated classes during the 18th century.

In his eyes Virgil's poem seemed the principal model for this genre, which he defined as “some part of the science of husbandry, put into a pleasing dress and set off with all the beauties and embellishments of poetry”.

For Roman citizens, farming was carried out in the service of the capital; for Britons the empire was consolidated as the result of mercantile enterprise and such commodities contributed to the general benefit.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the brisk rate of new translations continued into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with 1808 as a kind of annus mirabilis, when three new versions appeared.

[22] William Sotheby went on to place his acclaimed literary version of 1800 in the context of others across Europe when he reissued it in the sumptuous folio edition Georgica Publii Virgilii Maronis Hexaglotta (London, 1827).

[23] There it was accompanied by versions in Italian by Gian-Francesco Soave (1765),[24] in Spanish by Juan de Guzmán (1768),[25] in French by Jacques Delille (1769),[26] and in German by Johann Heinrich Voss (1789).

Virgil’s theme of taming the wilderness was further underlined in an introductory poem praising Grigory Potemkin as a philhellene Maecenas and the Empress Catherine the Great as the wise ruler directing the new territory's welfare.

"[37] Among a multiplicity of earlier translations, his new version would be justified by avoiding "that peculiar kind of Latin-derived pidgin-English which infects the style of so many classical scholars" and making its appeal instead through an approachable, down-to-earth idiom.

[38] In the 21st century, Frédéric Boyer's French version of the Georgics is retitled Le Souci de la terre (Care for the earth) and makes its appeal to current ecological concerns.

Attributed to an unidentified Master John, "The Feate of Gardeninge" dates from the first half of the 15th century and provides instructions for sowing, planting and growing fruits, herbs and flowers through the course of the year.

The poem’s 98 couplets are of irregular line-length and are occasionally imperfectly rhymed; the work was never printed, although annotated manuscript copies give evidence of its being studied and put to use.

The latter was a four-canto work in Latin hexameters, dealing respectively with flowers, disposition of trees, water and orchards, and was followed by two English versions shortly afterwards, translated by John Evelyn the Younger in 1673 and James Gardiner in 1706.

[43][44] Where those versions were written in rhyming couplets, however, William Mason later chose Miltonic blank verse for his The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1772–81), an original work that took the Georgics as its model.

[47][48] Where those versions were written in rhyming couplets, however, William Mason later chose Miltonic blank verse for his The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1772–81), an original work that took the Georgics as its model.

Thus Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai's Le Api (Bees, 1542) restricts itself to the subject of the fourth book of the Georgics and is an early example of Italian blank verse.

A Latin treatment of the subject figured as the fourteenth book of the original Paris edition of fr:Jacques Vanière's Praedium Rusticum (The Rural Estate) in 1696,[51] but was to have a separate English existence in a verse translation by Arthur Murphy published from London in 1799,[52] and later reprinted in the United States in 1808.

[53] But an earlier partial adaptation, Joshua Dinsdale's The Modern Art of Breeding Bees, had already appeared in London in 1740, prefaced with an apology to Virgil for trespassing on his ancient territory while bringing "some new Discov'ries to impart".

Joshua Dinsdale's The Dove Cote, or the art of breeding pigeons appeared in 1740;[62] and John Duncombe’s Fishing (quoted above), which was an adaptation written in the 1750s but unpublished until 1809.

[68] Shortly afterwards, James Grainger went on to create in his The Sugar Cane (1764) a "West-India georgic",[69] spreading the scope of this form into the Caribbean with the British colonial enterprise.

[70] Jacques Delille had already preceded him in France with a similar work, L'Homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises (Strasbourg, 1800), a translation of which by John Maunde had been published in London the following year as The Rural Philosopher: or French Georgics, a didactic poem, and in the USA in 1804.

[77] It was followed in the 20th century by Vita Sackville-West's The Land (1926),[78] which also pursued the course of the seasons through its four books and balanced rural know-how with celebratory description in the mode of Georgian Poetry.