For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality
with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," Thomson wrote two
poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former
_The Castle of Indolence_, the latter _The Seasons_. The Spenserian
manner is caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of
_Paradise Lost_, with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight,
removes any freshness the _Seasons_ might have had, had the
circumstances in them been put down as they were observed. As it is,
hardly anything is directly named; birds are always the "feathered
tribe" and everything else has a similar polite generality for its
title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, with a faculty for watching and
enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is
unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the
fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted
diction. It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not
understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged to read her in
translations.
(3)
The chief merits of "classic" poetry--its clearness, its vigour, its
direct statement--are such as belong theoretically rather to prose than
to poetry.
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