Slouching toward Augusta: Alexander Pope's 1736 "Windsor Forest"

A prevailing critical belief holds that Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" is an unequivocal celebration of English nationalism and the poet himself is a sympathetic imperialist. Yet such criticism fails to account for the 1736 version of the poem, which, while not significantly textually different from the 1713 version, is published with a number of footnotes detailing both original and alternative verses. The result is a version of "Windsor Forest" that manipulates the generic expectations of the georgic, which, as drawn from Joseph Addison's An Essay on the Georgics, transforms basic georgic tropes of husbandry and transition into structures of political reassessment.