SOURCE: "Observer and Observed in Eighteenth-Century Literature," in The Self Observed: Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972, pp. 7-32.

In the excerpt below, Golden examines patterns of "self-vision" in Thomson's poetry, notably The Castle of Indolence and The Seasons.

While James Thomson shares with Pope such contemporary aspirations as synthesis, civilization, and universal harmony, he necessarily shaped them into a different vision. Thomson seems to have been neither alienated nor overtly idiosyncratic. Aside from a line in Winter about his boyhood joys in storms and a stanza or two in The Castle of Indolence on his poetic ambitions, he did not break the generic limitations of the poeta to speak of his own career or condition. He left few letters or documents, and these reveal no more about obvious mental patterns than we can gather from the anecdotes of his friends about his laziness, his mild sensuality...