SOURCE: "From Accidie to Neurosis: The Castle of Indolence Revisited," in English Literature in the Age of Disguise, edited by Maximillian E. Novak, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 131-56.

Greene is an American educator and essayist. In the following excerpt, he discusses the moral, psychiatric, and theological aspects of The Castle of Indolence, arguing that the poem has been overshadowed by the popularity of Thomson's earlier work, The Seasons.

In 1916 George Saintsbury published a book about eighteenth-century English literature bearing the curious title The Peace of the Augustans. The book itself is a strange one. Saintsbury, then an old man in a new and frightening world, created in it an imaginary eighteenth century in which he found the security lacking in the Europe of 1916. The title is curious because, first, one does not read far in the English literature of the eighteenth century before discovering many expressions of...