SOURCE: An introduction and "Conclusion: The Artistry of The Seasons," in The Unfolding of "The Seasons," The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970, pp. 1-8, 324-30.

In the excerpt below, Cohen offers a critical analysis of The Seasons, finding it a major Augustan work in which "Thomson's unity, diction, and thought are entwined with a conception of man, nature, and God poetically tenable and distinctive."

A number of critics have sought to teach us how to read The Seasons, but their efforts still meet the determined resistance of such careful readers as F. R. Leavis and Reuben A. Brower. In Revaluation F. R. Leavis wrote: 'when we think of Johnson and Crabbe, when we recall any example of a poetry bearing a serious relation to the life of its time, then Gray, Thomson, Dyer, Akenside, Shenstone and the rest clearly belong to a by-line. It is literary and conventional in the...