SOURCE: Revell, Peter. “The Middle Western Pastoral.” In James Whitcomb Riley, pp. 106-29. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970.

In the following essay, Revell explicates the ways in which Riley's pastoral poems, particularly the “Johnson of Boone” poems, follow and adapt the generic formula of the pastoral.

Riley's work in the pastoral form came to represent for his age “the essential Riley” and is, with a few exceptions from the rural narratives, the part most worth preserving of his total oeuvre. There are pastoral elements in much of his other work in dialect and even some pastoral poems in modern English. Riley was not above attempting to people the Middle Western landscape with mythological trappings, in such neo-Keatsian sonnets as “Pan,” which sees the god loitering

                              … listlessly by woody streams, Soaking the lush glooms up with laziness; Or drowsing while the maiden winds caress Him prankishly, and powder him...