The Arcades Project - Operi

ing the great epochs of urban life, we see that the more the city provides poets
and other people with their intellectual and moral life, the more forcefully poetry
is pushed outside the city. When, ... in the Greek world, that life was fostered
within the great cosmopolitan centers of Alexandria and Syracuse, these cities
gave birth to pastoral poetry. When the Rome of Augustus came to occupy a
similar position of centrality, the same poetry of shepherds, . .. of pristine nature,
appeared with the Bucolics and the Georgies of Virgil. And in eighteenth-century
France, at the most brilliant moment ... of Parisian existence, the pastoral re
appears as part of a return to antiquity . ... The only poet in whom one might
find a foretaste of Baudelairean urbanism (and of other things Baudelairean as
well) would be perhaps, at certain moments, Saint-Amant." Albert Thibaudet,
Interieurs (Paris