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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.

System as both concept and genre figures large in eighteenth-century literature. Christopher Smart encountered system as a fact of mid-century authorship and the reality of the madhouse, and each was a contact point for Smart's literary rendering of system in periodicals ( The Student ) and poetry ("Jubilate Agno"). The Student is Smart's self-systemization, as he internalizes system through the voice of The Student 's narrator, Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis. "Jubilate Agno" is a master system, reconciling the meaning of nature in religious, scientific, and poetic terms with a governing method for sublimating to poetic process the closed circuit perfection of a totalizing system.

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