Pastoral Poetry - Primary Sources

It's interesting because my first instinct as far as getting primary sources was to request from the stacks a lot of books titled pastoral poetry. There were the usual pastoral poetry, Victorian pastoral poetry,  17th Century pastoral poetry - even a title called The Use of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry.  Yet none of them were really answering the questions/assignment posed by the professor-




None of them were  really key parts of the genre but just quite compact books of pieces.   

It wasn't until I looked more into better secondary sources that  I found more relevant primary sources.  One of my problems was that I was using the wrong databases to search for things.  I used our librarian's research guide page however, I was using the "background information" search engines.  The sources I found in the  Oxford Reference Online search and Gale Virtual Reference Library were mainly of the definition type.  

It wasn't until I started using search engines in the lower section of the page, like JSTOR, America: History and Life with Full Text  and MLA International Bibliography.  I began to search the main key term of "pastoral poetry" and the additional term of "theory". 

 With these search types, I still had plenty of results; realistically, I should have found another way to narrow down the search whether that be with another key term or just sorting the search results by most recent date.  But instead, I did the same process I do when I shop on Amazon and scrolled somewhat excessively through at least 6 pages of results.  In comparison to the other secondary source searches, it was the easiest one.  Reading through the sources, nearly each one had examples of pastoral poetry to analyze in the theory they were presenting.  I was finally seeing key texts in the sub-genre research like "The Country and The City" by Williams.  The idea of pastoral poetry being more or an idealized order, a presentation of nostalgia, rather than just exaggerated pieces of landscapes and shepherds.  There were also repeated examples such as:

"Idyll 1" by Theocritus and "Arcadia" by Joseph Sannazaro.  There were also however, some very specific examples to theories or one text that was more of a teacher instruction.  Overall, I definitely realized the importance of search database content.