SOURCE: "Formal Balance in Thomson and Collins," in Preromanticism, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 24-8.

In the following excerpt, Brown looks at Thomson—and especially at his alleged inconsistencies—as part of the poetry of the "urbane sublime." At the base of the apparent "wanderings" in this poetry, Brown finds a notion of the social that creates coherence.

… Because of its inherent discretion the urbane sublime is able to tolerate many apparent paradoxes. It is both high and light, sophisticated and primitive, liberal and aristocratic, elevated and capable of describing the most mundane phenomena, innovative and doggedly conventional.¹⁷ It is perhaps the presence of these contradictory impulses, rather than its unnatural inflation, that often makes modern readers ill at ease with eighteenth-century poetry, and it is certainly the persistence of contradictory impulses that makes the history of eighteenth-century poetry so baffling to write. Having used the Eton College ode...