Containing Elegy

Abstract Chapter 4 considers additional energy for the new poetics drawn from the major literary developments that followed the composition of Vergil’s Bucolics. It focuses on the sources for Calpurnius’ innovations found in elegiac poetry of the Augustan period that flourished after Vergil. While Vergil closed his bucolic collection by staging an encounter between bucolic and elegy, personified by Gallus, in Bucolic 10, the last poem of his collection, Calpurnius uses elegiac features throughout his book to develop three distinctive elements of his poetics: the presence of writing, violence toward the beloved, and introduction of language of aesthetic judgment to shepherds’ encounters. All these elements help to create a radically different version of pastoral.