Because the long, reflective landscape poem The Seasons (1730) commanded so much attention and affection for at least a hundred years after James Thomson wrote it, his achievement has been identified with it. Thomson, however, was also a political figure through other poems and through some of his plays, standing strongly for a kind of republican ideal against what he saw as the vulpine individualism and oligarchic government of Robert Walpole. As a Scot who spent his adult life in England, he embodied in his work a comity between the two lands and traditions. Partly with these sociopolitical interests in mind, partly to complement the sweep and poignancy of The Seasons, he wrote five tragedies and a patriotic masque of some distinction. Finally, his Spenserian allegory, The Castle of Indolence (1748), stands as the finest in English other than Spenser's own.

The son of the Scots clergyman Thomas Thomson and...