Milton's hypotextual presence in James Thomson's Summer (1727)

Kwinten Van De Waller

The hypotextual influence of Milton on James Thomson’s The Seasons, even though generally recognised by literary critics and scholars,1 is an area of study which warrants further research, especially since it is of crucial importance to Thomson’s poetics in the first edition of Summer. A Poem. In line with recent critical readings of the individual seasons,2 I propose an examination of Thomson’s second seasonal poem to reveal a continuation as well as an adaptation of Winters poetical premises. The poet structures Summer (which was published by John Millan in 1727) around the same dynamic alternation of external nature descriptions and internal reflective passages and reintroduces several of Winters aesthetic contexts, especially the epic modulation transferred to the genre of the descriptive long poem. At the same time, Thomson develops Summer more strongly within a Miltonic framework. Singling out his countryman from the catalogue of epic poets invoked in Winter, he designates Milton as his principal literary model and adopts a profoundly Miltonic poetic diction. Thomson’s treatment of the literary past focuses on a national tradition, thereby contributing to a contemporaneous canonising impulse of British indigenous poets. However, Thomson does not adopt a Miltonic diction in an unimaginative way: instead, he redeploys the Newtonian interest already displayed in the external nature descriptions in Winter and establishes a fusion between an epic-Miltonic and a scientific diction. Thomson thus creates a poetic style which not only

Tanam n°45/2oi2