SOURCE: "The Whig Sublime and James Thomson," in English Language Notes, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, September, 1986, pp. 27-35.

In the essay below, Cohen defines and examines the "curious fusion of aesthetic and political ideas," which he terms the "Whig Sublime," as it appears in Thomson's dramas.

In 1976 I first described an early eighteenth-century literary phenomenon which I called the Whig Sublime. The Whig Sublime fuses the imagery of the "natural sublime"—descriptions of natural scenes of great size or power such as mountains, oceans, deserts, storms, and so on—with the notion, especially appealing to the Whigs, that England's liberty and democratic institutions came from the rough northern homeland of her Germanic invaders, the "Goths." The Whigs saw themselves as the inheritors and preservers of this "Gothic" heritage of liberty, and the plays and poems written as Whig party vehicles during the first decades of the eighteenth century are...