SOURCE: "A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton: Introduction" and "Britannia: Introduction," in The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems by James Thomson, edited by Alan Dugald McKillop, University of Kansas Press, 1961, pp. 128-47, 157-64.

In the excerpt below, McKillop critically examines two of Thomson's major poems, providing historical background for each.

Thomson's poem, linked in various ways, like all his work, with tendencies already clearly defined in the feeling and thought of his age, still conveys a fresh and authentic response to Newtonian science. Like the physico-theological pieces, it seeks some degree of precision, and in the tradition of philosophical panegyric it takes the highest ground. Among Thomson's shorter pieces it preeminently illustrates Miss [Josephine] Miles' excellent description of his mode as "an exceptionally panoramic and panegyric verse, emotional, pictorial, noble, universal, and tonal, rising to the height of heaven and of feeling in...