Ecology and the Pastoral in Recent French Poetry: Jean-Claude Pinson, Pierre Vinclair, and Olivier Domerg

Abstract

Since the pastoral was no longer practiced as a classical poetic genre, several French poetic publications of the year 2020 have offered updated revisions of this notion. An essay by Jean-Claude Pinson establishes pastoral as the deep mission of poetry: it is the everlasting voice of Nature, whatever this concept refers to. Meanwhile, this essay argues, the poetic writings of Pierre Vinclair and Olivier Domerg develop a more complex vision of the pastoral through a coherent net of allusions to the genre. Specifically, Vinclair suspects that the pastoral tradition might exaggerate the poet’s innocence, which he considers contrary to the ecological necessity of a wild poetry. Domerg, the essay shows, regenerates the pastoral by locating the ecological lyric inside the subject’s gaze towards the pastoral landscape, which he cuts in new poetic forms in order to find the source of pastoral and georgic inspirations. The essay will demonstrate that the selected works of these poets prove the survival of the pastoral in contemporary literature; but unlike Pinson’s theory, this poetic practice maintains a critical distance, echoing the second-wave ecocriticism, from any faith in the powers of action of the pastoral tradition.