The Seasons (Thomson)

Frontispiece of an edition of The Seasons published by Alexander Donaldson

The Seasons is a series of four poems written by the Scottish author James Thomson. The first part, Winter, was published in 1726, and the completed poem cycle appeared in 1730.[1]

The poem was extremely influential, and stimulated works by John Christopher Smith, Joseph Haydn, Thomas Gainsborough and J. M. W. Turner among many others.[1]

Context

Thompson was educated at Jedburgh Grammar School and Edinburgh University where he was a member of "The Grotesques" literary club; some of his early poems were published in the Edinburgh Miscellany of 1720. Seeking a larger stage, he went to London in 1725, and became the tutor of Thomas Hamilton (who became the 7th Earl of Haddington) in Barnet. There he was able to begin Winter, the first of his four Seasons.[2]

Blank verse had been considered more of an interesting toy than anything useful to poetry, despite John Milton's epic-scale Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained half a century earlier.[3]

Poem

The poem was published one season at a time, Winter in 1726, Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728 and Autumn only in the complete edition of 1730.[2] Thomson borrowed Milton's Latin-influenced vocabulary and inverted word order, with phrases like "in convolution swift". He extended Milton's narrative use of blank verse to use it for description and to give a meditative feeling.[4] The critic Raymond Dexter Havens called Thomson's style pompous and contorted, remarking that Thompson seemed to have avoided "calling things by their right names and speaking simply, directly, and naturally".[4]

Influence

The lengthy blank verse poem, reflecting on the landscape of the countryside, was highly influential and much liked for at least a century after its writing.[3] Especially lavish editions were produced between 1830 and 1870 in Britain and America.[5]

A dispute over the publishing rights to The Seasons gave rise to two important legal decisions (Millar v. Taylor; Donaldson v. Beckett) in the history of copyright.

Thomson's The Seasons was translated into German by Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1745). This translation formed the basis for a work with the same title by Gottfried van Swieten, which became the libretto for Haydn's oratorio The Seasons.[6]

Artists such as Thomas Medland, Anker Smith and John Neagle (1792) created engravings to accompany the poems.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 Sambrook, 2004
  2. 1 2 "Local History Notes: James Thomson 1700-1748" (PDF). London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  3. 1 2 "James Thomson". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  4. 1 2 Shaw, Robert Burns (2007). Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Ohio University Press. pp. 61–62. ISBN 978-0-8214-1757-7.
  5. ↑ Stevenson, Louise L. "The Transatlantic Travels of James Thomson's The Seasons and its Baggage of Material Culture, 1730-1870" (PDF). American Antiquarian. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  6. ↑ "Haydn Oratorios - The Creation & The Seasons". Early Music World. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  7. ↑ "James Thomson's The Seasons: Autumn". Art of the Print. Retrieved 1 July 2015.

Sources

Further reading

External links

Texts on Wikisource:

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