SOURCE: "James Thomson's Luxuriant Language," in Graces of Harmony: Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, The University of Georgia Press, 1977, pp. 118-35.

In the following essay, Adams examines alliteration, assonance, and consonance in Thomson's poetry, citing it as a key to understanding what some critics have termed its "luxuriance."

"It … sometimes can be charged with filling the ear more than the mind."—Dr. Johnson

Few poems have been so often reprinted or so often condemned and admired as James Thomson's The Seasons, and one of the most controversial of that once popular poem's characteristics is its diction. Although Dr. Johnson admired Thomson, he spoke for a large group of readers, including Wordsworth and Hazlitt, when in The Lives of the English Poets he said of one aspect of Thomson's diction, it "is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant…. It is too exuberant and sometimes can...