ABSTRACT

Windsor-Forest was first published on 7 March 1713. As with several other poems, Pope gave differing accounts of the circumstances of the poem’s composition. The first portion of the surviving autograph manuscript fair copy probably dating from late 1712 – consisting of the first 380 lines of the earliest extant version of the poem (held in the Washington University Library and reproduced in Schmitz 1952) – includes an autograph note (clearly written some years later) in which Pope distinguishes two principal periods of composition: the first part written ‘after ye Pastorals’, with the last hundred lines added ‘soon after’ the Treaty of Utrecht, which brought an end to the War of the Spanish Succession. The unreliability of this note is clear from the hesitation over supplying precise dates (see the variants to Pope’s annotation below) and the fact that the Treaty was not ratified, and its terms not finalised, until July of 1713, by which time Windsor-Forest had already been published. In the version of the manuscript note that Pope added to the poem in 1736, he stated that the first part was written in 1704 and the latter in 1710. In 1751 this second date, an obvious error, was changed to read 1713. Pope had certainly completed a version of the poem by 1707, when it is mentioned by Pope’s friend the Reverend Ralph Bridges in a letter of 28 October to his uncle, Sir William Trumbull, who is named in the poem and who was evidently one of its early sponsors (Sherburn 1958a: 343; TE I.126); Bridges writes that Pope intended that either Windsor-Forest or one of the Pastorals would be dedicated to Trumbull. Writing on 12 May 1713, Trumbull claimed to have ‘put [Pope] upon this subject’ and to have helped revise it, as with the Pastorals (Sherburn 1958a: 345–6; TE, I.126; Rogers 2005a: 11). However, Lansdowne (Granville as he then was) was probably also one of the early readers of the poem in manuscript. In June 1739, Pope told Spence ‘Lord Lansdowne insisted on my publishing my Windsor Forest, and the motto shoes it (Non injussa cano)’ (OAC, I, 43; see notes to Epigraph and 5 below).