The Politics of the Pastoral

“The Garden” is heavily rooted in the pastoral literary tradition. Many of the hallmark features of the pastoral are present in the poem: the focus on the natural world, the emphasis on physical beauty, the rejection of society and civilization, and the romanticization of country life. However, “The Garden” is also different than many pastoral poems in terms of its orientation towards romance as well as in its politics.

Many works of pastoral art during the early modern period respond very directly to the political conditions in which they are created. Most notably, they are often responding to the enclosure movement. Enclosure was an English legal procedure in which public lands, like gardens, greens, and town squares, could pass from public to private ownership in order to make them more productive. Enclosure represented the shift from an agrarian society to an industrialized...