SOURCE: Wasserman, Earl R. “Denham: Cooper's Hill.” In The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, pp. 45-88. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959.

In the following essay, Wasserman uses the idea of concordia discors to analyze Coopers Hill, arguing that the politics of Denham's day were an overriding concern of the descriptive, thematic, and symbolic aspects of the poem.

I

Although it has long been a staple of criticism that whatever is good in Pope's Windsor Forest is to be found in its lively descriptions of the natural scene, a parallel critical tradition claims, as one of its exponents puts it, that the poem fails in its intent to be descriptive because it is “too conventional and formal”—it must be read as primarily an exercise in style. On the contrary, another critic has told us, “Not description, but rather ‘reflections upon life and political institutions...