SOURCE: "Vision and Meaning in James Thomson," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. IV, No. 4, Summer, 1965, pp. 206-19.

An American essayist, biographer, and educator, Spacks has written extensively on eighteenth-century poetry. In the following essay, she demonstrates that, as is evidenced in The Seasons, Thomson possesses "clear physical vision, and the ability to reproduce its perceptions," as well as "the vital gift of transforming imaginative vision."

Although James Thomson's The Seasons was early admired for its fine sentiments, its greatest influence was clearly as a work of natural description. Thomson himself, however, soon became aware of the essential impossibility of recording actuality in poetry. Spring (1728) contains a revealing passage (quoted here in its slightly altered final form):

 But who can paint
Like Nature? Can imagination boast,
Amid its gay creation, hues like hers?
Or can it mix them with that matchless skill,
And lose them in each other, as...