A poem of rural people and settings or a poem treating of shepherds and rustic life in a clearly unrealistic manner. Pastoral is after the Latin for Shepherd (pastor). These shepherds often speak in courtly language and when depicted visually look more like they belong at court than on some hillside tending sheep. The pastoral often is used to create a rural/urban dichotomy, with the rural being "good," a place of life and sustenance and the urban "bad," a place of decay and degeneracy. The rural is often portrayed as the simple and revered while the urban is complex and to be avoided. Rural life is idealized and urban life, by contrast, demonized. The pastoral can be found in just about any genre of literature, in whole or part.
_{Sources: The Oxford Companion to English Literature and A Handbook to Literature.}