Entertainment / Literature / Eclogue: (Greek 'selection') A short poem or short section of a longer poem in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy--especially one with pastoral elements. The term was first applied to Virgil's pastoral poems, but the term covers Renaissance imitators as well. Examples include Spenser's The Shepheard's Calendar (1579). After the 1700s, the term increasingly came to mean any poem having the structural form of the earlier eclogues--even works that were not pastoral. Examples of these eclogues include Swift's A Town Eclogue, Frost's Build Soil, or W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. The term should not be confused with epilogue, below.
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Lifestyle / Poetry / Bucolic : Sir thomas elyot's latin-english dictionary (1538) explains 'bucolicum carmen, a poeme made of herdmen.' cf. Eclogue, idyll, and pastoral. MORE