The pastoral genre provides cognitive literary historians a clear example of how genre cooperates with and enacts the most basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the ability to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. This essay discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggest that it offers a usefully revisionary way of thinking about genres and archetypes. Examples from Tasso’s Aminta (c.1573), Marvell’s “The Garden,” (c.1650), and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013) exemplify both the artists’ and the audiences’ cognitive flexibility, and their attempts to solve representationally hungry problems by re-representing them.