SOURCE: "Religion and Poetry, 1660-1780," in The Poet and His Faith: Religion and Poetry in England from Spenser to Eliot and Auden, The University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 123-59.

In the excerpt below, Woodhouse finds Thomson's poetry to represent the synthesis of several religious and aesthetic strands which eventually saw their culmination in William Wordsworth's Prelude.

With the spaciousness of the Georgics as precedent, James Thomson writes his poem on the seasons, mingling scenes from nature and rural life with philosophic reflections on nature and the God of nature. In these reflections the influence of Shaftesbury is dominant, but it is joined by that of Newton. Indeed, as McKillop has shown, all the major currents of religio-philosophic thought as applied to nature meet in The Seasons; and the reflections are supported by a more immediate response to the variety, grandeur, and beauty of nature than is found in...