SOURCE: "James Thomson's Luxuriant Language," in Graces of Harmony: Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, The University of Georgia Press, 1977, pp. 118-35.

In the essay reprinted below, Adams provides a detailed reading of the sounds in Thomson's blank verse. Looking at Thomson in the context of other Neoclassical poets, Adams concludes that Thomson strove for a "fitting of sound to sense."

Few poems have been so often reprinted or so often condemned and admired as James Thomson's The Seasons,¹ and one of the most controversial of that once popular poem's characteristics is its diction. Although Dr. Johnson admired Thomson, he spoke for a large group of readers, including Wordsworth and Hazlitt, when in The Lives of the English Poets he said of one aspect of Thomson's diction, it "is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant…. It is too exuberant and sometimes can be charged with...