Abstract
In this essay I show that the pleasure provided by the poem as an imaginary landscape, as evidenced in rhetorical theory (Quintilian's analysis of varietas in Virgil's Georgics ), and in exemplary poems by Du Bellay ('Romae descriptio') and Ronsard ('Elegie a Louis Des Masures'), can be identified as that of unconstrained movement. Aristotle's definition of pleasure as unimpeded activity of our natural faculties in the Nicomachean Ethics captures the aesthetic attraction yielded by descriptive variety and links it to the ethical. Poussin's heroic landscape painting is an avatar of this neoclassical, humanist pleasure.
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