Short answers, pulled from the story.
The pastoral genre depicts an idealized version of the shepherd's life in open countryside, addressed to an urban audience. It originated in classical antiquity with poets like Theocritus and Virgil, and includes subgenres such as the pastoral elegy, pastoral romance, country house poem, and pastoral science fiction.
Hesiod's Works and Days is the earliest text cited for pastoral sentiments, describing a golden age of harmony with nature. Theocritus, the Hellenistic Greek poet, gave the pastoral its first recognizable literary form in his Idylls, and the Roman poet Virgil adapted it into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues.
Arcadia is the traditional setting for the pastoral genre, borrowed from a rural region of Greece but treated as a literary construct representing an idealized Eden. Virgil was the first poet to set his pastoral works in Arcadia, and the location became the standard reference point for later pastoral literature across Europe.
The anti-pastoral, defined by Terry Gifford in his 2012 essay Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies, is an explicit correction of pastoral that emphasizes realism over romance and highlights the tensions, disorders, and inequalities that idealized pastoral writing ignores. Sir Walter Raleigh's 1600 poem The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd is an early English example.
Beethoven wrote his Pastoral Symphony avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favor of relatively slow rhythms. He labeled the work more the expression of feeling than realistic painting, shifting the pastoral from landscape description toward interior psychology.
Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, first published in 1579, is considered a landmark in English pastoral poetry. It consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in dialect, containing elegies, fables, and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear in the poems under pseudonyms, with Spenser himself called Colin Clout.