There is no intrinsic reason why shepherding should be a popular subject for literary writing: why herdsmen and not schoolteachers? Yet pastoral motifs show an astonishing ability to survive and mutate. Classical and renaissance writers viewed the pastoral as the oldest form of poetry and the genre's continuing power is demonstrated by the commercial and critical success of Ang Lee's 2005 film of E. Annie Proulx's 1997 short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’. Unfortunately, commentary on pastoral poetry has tended to emphasize formal and literaryhistorical patterns over the political contexts in which the genre has flourished. And although Raymond Williams, James Turner, Roger Sales and John Barrell have analysed the class connotations of pastoral writing, relatively little has been said about the eighteenth-century pastoral's engagement with homoeroticism. This is odd given that same-sex desire is as prominent in classical and renaissance pastorals as it is in Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Moreover gender and sexuality are closely linked to the pastoral's role in the construction and projection of poetic identity.

The present chapter will extend this book's investigation of form and ideology by exploring how male eighteenth-century pastoral poets elide or exploit the form's ancient preoccupation with homoerotic desire; it will also ask what these poetic responses tell us about changing constructions of masculinity. The discussion will culminate in a reading of the eighteenth century's most famous pastoral poem, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. But before looking at Gray, we need to understand why the pastoral occupied such a powerful place in the eighteenth century's literary imagination. It 's not only that pastoral writing offered an apparently nostalgic and idealized version of the past, it 's also that the pastoral's otherworldly space frequently refers – directly or indirectly – to contemporary society. The pastoral was therefore a genre in which allegories of the present could be enfolded within fantasies of the past.

To give a specific instance, pastoral poetry often comments on the relationship between clients and their patrons; thus, critics have often argued over the degree to which Virgil 's Eclogues (42–37 BC) do or do not praise the poet's patron, Augustus Caesar.