James Thomson’s series of poems about the four seasons was written between 1726 and 1730. First publishing the poems individually in that span, Thomson then published them as a complete series in 1730 to immediate praise and not a small amount of ridicule for his pompous diction and Latinate syntax–both of which Thomson took from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Thomson also took Milton’s blank verse, also the preferred verse of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and put it to more contemplative use than Milton had. Whereas Milton’s epic cribs from and expands upon subjects of biblical history, Thomson expands the use of blank verse to not only meditative subjects but also to science, a topic Milton largely dodges in his poem.
One reason for the mixed reception was the blank verse was viewed as novelty in this time when the prevailing verse form was the tighter, sparser heroic couplets of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Significantly, in the late seventeenth century, Milton himself explicitly opposed this “modern bondage of rhyming,” For a poet of the next century to use blank verse was itself a pointed statement about where that poet stood in an ongoing aesthetic debate in the eighteenth century.
