ABSTRACT
‘Vertumnus and Pomona’ was first published on 20 May 1712. Spence records Pope’s early enthusiasm for Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘When Mr. Pope first got into the way of teaching himself and applied so close to it in the Forest, some of his first exercises were imitations of the stories that pleased him most in Ovid’ (OAC, I.12, no. 25, 1743). The language of this recollection echoes the ‘Advertisement’ with which Pope prefaced his translations in collected editions from the 1736 Works on:
THE following Translations were selected from many others done by the Author in his youth; for the most part indeed but a sort of Exercises, while he was improving himself in the Languages, and carried by his early Bent to Poetry to perform them rather in Verse than Prose.
