Landscapes "Dynamically in Motion": Revisiting Issues of Structure and Agency in Thomson's The Seasons.

This article analyzes eighteenth-century poetry, particularly the poem entitled The Seasons, by James Thomson. Eighteenth-century poetry has been celebrated as a field that is becoming increasingly exciting to work in, that has opened out in several directions, and in which new poetic voices have begun to be heard. This recognition of the diversity of eighteenth-century poetry requires a new kind of critical response, one that is more flexible and varied. This call for a new approach, for a criticism that experiments with different perspectives, is one that had been made a few years earlier to readers of James Thomson. Thomson's most popular poem, The Seasons, should be reconsidered in this new and positive school of criticism. The Seasons has, in recent years, been the subject of a range of politicized readings. Thomson's poetry has been productively explored within the wider context of his patriotism and opposition politics, and there has been a strong trend for reading the passages of landscape description within The Seasons as ideologically infused, an approach that marks the prospect view as a mode of disinterested vision available only to the landowning aristocracy. Much of the writing on Thomson's prospect description within The Seasons has characterized it as demonstrating a triumph of authority over nature that inevitably involves the detachment of the speaker from the scene described.