Virgil's Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison's Theory of the Imagination

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to outline Addison's suggestion that the narrator of the georgic poem, a landowning gentleman, has an overtly political character. Central to Addison's claim was his thesis that the narrator's power derived from his superior imagination, which enabled him to perceive the affairs of the nation, and so maintain his political eminence. It will be suggested that Addison's deepest and most consistent concern was with the role and political and economic reform of the landowning gentry, and not with the formation of manners in the public sphere. There was a renewed interest in Virgil's Georgics towards the end of the seventeenth century. Not only was Sir John Denham's popular Coopers Hill a georgic poem, but a bustle of activity chaired by John Dryden saw new published translations of parts or all of the four books of the Georgics between 1684 and 1694, as well as an extended commentary on the poems by Joseph Addison in Dryden's 1697 complete translation of Virgil on how the narration of the viewer's survey in georgic poetry constituted the narrator's political character.1