Pastoral poetry has a long tradition in poetry – going back to the idylls of the ancient Greeks. Am I a bad person/poet for not being a particular fan of the genre?

I have always been an creature of the urban world. Not in the sense of coming from some conception of the “streets” emerging out of hip hop. My youth in Tampa Bay, the Larchmont neighborhood of Norfolk, and Montgomery is better seen as being suburban, rather than true city life. It was only later in life, when I lived in Los Angeles and Washington that I truly experienced city life (and Washington hasa surprising small town feel to it). No,I say urban strictly as a counterpoint to a more rural, less densely populated community.

Like most poets I know, I am a great fan of the Romantics – and one thinks of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey’s connection to England’s rural Lake District, as as well as the luscious descriptions of Southern Europe in Byron’s Childe Harold. But I have always loved Wordsworth’s interior-minded Prelude more than The Excursion and Shelley’s claustrophoic Prometheus more than Byron’s expansive and natural Childe Harold.

Am I alone in this? Or has poetry, like most of the world, moved into an urban realm? Is there a place for traditional, yet also contemporary, pastoral poetry outside of the politically minded eco-poetics of Snyder and Merwin?

I don’t have answer to that. But I am happy to be proven wrong.