John Gay, Rural Sports

Ian Gordon (Anglia Ruskin University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1713

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poetry (any)

Resources

Gay published Rural Sports, a poem of 443 lines, loosely modelled on Virgil's Georgics, in January 1713. Like Virgil, Gay focuses on rural activities, but in Gay's poem descriptions of pursuits of pleasure replace Virgil's descriptions of the labour involved in cultivating the land. Where Virgil celebrates the life of the farmer as the moral and political basis of national health, Gay praises the rural sports of fishing, hunting and shooting for the healthy life they offer, while at the same time gently mocking the idyll he describes.

Gay dedicated Rural Sports to his friend Pope, whose Windsor-Forest was finally published two months later, in March 1713, developing some of the s…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1340 words

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "Rural Sports". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 March 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2273, accessed 24 November 2024.]

Save this article