SOURCE: "The Long Poem Obstructed," in Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, Cornell, 1982, pp. 157-88.

In the excerpt below, Sitter offers a thematic discussion of Liberty and the constituent poems of The Seasons.

If we consider Thomson's poetic career and take seriously his aspirations as a philosophic poet, we need to give more witness than usual to Liberty, his second longest poem and the work which occupied many of his best years. Liberty was published in 1735-1736; Thomson seems to have begun it shortly after completing The Seasons in 1730, and many of the more than 1,000 lines added to The Seasons in the editions of 1744 and 1746 reflect Thomson's political preoccupations. Thomson may well have thought, as McKillop has suggested, of his new subject as the outcome of a Virgilian maturation from pastoral to a more overtly political and epic undertaking. We may think of it, less consciously and generically, as...