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Chapter 2 reads Thomson’s mixed-genre descriptive poem The Seasons (1730-46). Though the poem gives form to the idea of a consistent climate, the texture of the circling year, Thomson recognized conditions of disastrous disequilibrium in nature that could not be fully incorporated in the harmonious universe of Newtonian physicotheology or confident proclamations of national progress. This chapter connects Thomson’s distinct mode of poetic description, which derives from Virgil’s Georgics, with Britain’s “advanced organic” energy regime. The imperative to describe the works of nature, to detail the Earth’s shaping forces, reflects an energy economy organized around concrete temporal and geographic variations in access to solar radiation. The reception of The Seasons, its initial popularity and its increasing obsolescence in the nineteenth century, tracks with the transition from an organic to an industrial mode of production.

This chapter turns to public and poetic texts that relate their performative capacity to effect a transformation in the sovereign order to the originary acts that establish symbolic law. It considers the remediation of creaturely voice, first in several periodical essays that, addressing a humanitarian public, identify tyrannical custom with sovereign “inhumanity,” and then in two canonical Augustan poems, Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest and James Thomson’s The Seasons. Poetic language redistributes symbolic authority either by concentrating the potential of creaturely substitution in personifying tropes or multiplying the addressees that establish the place, always still to come, of humanity. This chapter speculates that the introduction of the perspective of an implied witness, a third position in the communicative exchange between sovereign and subject, is a defining feature of public communication, which serves to recalibrate the thetic distribution, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, by which voices are accorded meaning.

Moving forward into the early Hanoverian era, this chapter analyses the political significance of Newtonian apologetic as it found expression in the poetry of James Thomson. The heterodox inclinations of leading Newtonian divines, such as Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, and Thomas Rundle, compromised whiggish attempts to enlist the new science in the service of Hanoverian panegyric, despite Queen Caroline’s well-publicized Newtonian enthusiasms. But for those whigs—both court and opposition—who were disturbed by Robert Walpole’s alliance with the heresy-hunting bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, the ‘latitudinarian’ associations of Newtonian religion could hold a strong political appeal. This latter possibility is shown to inform the blend of Shaftesburean enthusiasm and Newtonian physico-theology in Thomson’s The Seasons (1730).

This chapter examines the complex legacy of Shaftesburianism and reveals the enduring vitality of natural and magical conceptions of sympathy through the first half of the eighteenth century. In so doing, it revises the standard model of treating sympathy in eighteenth-century studies, according to which sympathy “rose” after the Restoration as an exclusively moral and social principle. Both David Fordyce’s Dialogues Concerning Education and James Thomson’s Seasons reinforced Shaftesbury’s version of a sympathetic worldview, and both works demonstrate the extent to which natural and moral conceptions of sympathy remained in active conversation. With the widening impact of skepticism and empiricism among the intellectual elite, strong claims for the naturalness of sympathetic response in society functioned to secure an idea of order that was becoming more and more uncertain in the universe as a whole. As the case of Thomson shows, the aesthetic was an increasingly hospitable environment for a universal conception of sympathy that was increasingly out of place in mainstream scientific accounts of the natural world. At the same time, poets and philosophers appealed to Newtonianism as a means of bolstering a sympathetic worldview; represented as analogous to gravity, sympathy could be reuniversalized as a scientific principle.

This chapter explores representations of enlightenment progress that influence many other writers throughout this book. James Thomson offers a striking instance of poetry’s uncomfortable embrace of an enlightened figurative apparatus of progressivism. Thomson explicitly works within the genre of the “progress” poem to deploy the allegorical apparatus of progressive philosophy and history. In poems such as The Seasons, material change over time is organized and guided by the figure of “Philosophy”: philosophy provides the ungovernable forces of human and natural life with a seemingly inviolable sense of direction. But the errant “wondering” and “enchantment” that Thompson strives to dispel with his “philosophic eye” is precisely what attracts Anna Letitia Barbauld in her adventurous revision of Thomson’s writing. I show how works such as Barbauld’s Corsica tentatively identify the politics of Corsican independence with an “urbanity” and “polish’d grace” reminiscent of Thomson and legions of progressive historians. But urbanity and polish are all but lost in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a poem that documents Britain’s decline in the wake of its involvement in foreign wars. Instead, Barbauld celebrates a still-continued “light” emanating from the works of British authors: this is not the light of conventional enlightened progress—a light now faded—but a light that nourishes Dissenting reading practices with a “fearless spirit” and “patriot zeal.”

Bailey opens this piece reflecting on James Thomson's poem, "The Seasons." As Bailey further explains, the seasons are "stages in a persisting and everlasting process" which present the garden "as one continuous and connected emotion." He also provides a brief reflection on the future of gardening, where one continuing essence is certain: the gardening-sentiment, or the satisfaction of growing plants.

Gioachino Rossini returned home from Venice with money in his pocket and the hope of a new commission. Unfortunately, Bologna was no longer the best place to be. By 1811 Milan had taken over as continental Europe’s principal meeting place for impresarios and agents. Bologna was becoming a bit of a backwater. While he waited, Rossini rehearsed and directed an Italian-language performance of Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons sponsored by the Accademia dei Concordi. He may also have written the six-movement showpiece cantata for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, La morte di Didone (“The Death of Dido”), which he presented to Domenico Mombelli’s daughter, Ester Mombelli. If he did write it in 1811, it offers a remarkable glimpse of things to come.

The book as a whole emphasizes a productive discontinuity between various eighteenth-century poets and both their Miltonic sources and their Romantic successors. Two interludes, however, qualify this picture by showing how a mortalist poetics, shared by the late Milton and some early Romantic writers, persisted in between the two in certain quarters of Enlightenment England. The first interlude focuses on the poet James Thomson. It identifies and discusses a few of the theological implications of his Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton (1727) and his revisions to The Seasons (1730).

This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It reads his “alchemical autobiography,” Sophie’s Place, as a poem of his aesthetic education as an artist, particularly under the tripart guidance of Cornell, the poet Robert Duncan, and the collage artist Jess, tracing this influence into his “H. D. Trilogy.”

Milton’s account of creation is examined alongside the discourse of physico-theology, which read ‘the book of nature’ as a testament to the wisdom and benevolence of its divine author. To recover the physico-theological tradition is to reveal continuities between revolutionary England and post-Restoration culture that scholars have long ignored, for although the physico-theological craze is a post-Restoration phenomenon, its founding texts date from the revolutionary period. Writing in the physico-theological mode always sets itself the same (impossible) task: leveraging the new natural history to do the work of theodicy. Instead of engaging the natural world through allegorical interpretation, physico-theology attempts to analyse a system, reconstructing and imaginatively inhabiting each subject position within that system. The project of physico-theology provides a bridge between the age of Milton and the age of the novel; the habits of thought it encouraged were precisely those suited to the new prose fiction.