James Thomson and the Progress of the Progress Poem: From Liberty to The Castle of Indolence

Summary

Thomson seems to have been at odds with his readers from the very beginning in claiming that Liberty was his best poem. The declining print runs for the first editions of the successive parts speak for themselves, and Johnson provided a guide for posterity's verdict when he wrote in the ‘Life of Thomson’: ‘Liberty called in vain upon her votaries to read her praises and reward her encomiast: her praises were condemned to harbour spiders, and to gather dust’. Even the wave of critical reassessments which followed the questioning of the canon seems to have come up against an effective breakwater in Liberty: for the vast majority of his readers, Thomson remains the poet of The Seasons. Those who are stimulated to read further will almost certainly choose to progress straight to The Castle of Indolence.

If it has proved impossible to present Liberty as a successful poem, it has at least become possible to see it as an interesting one, following exploration of its political and literary origins by Alan Dugald McKillop and Bertrand A. Goldgar. This research has been developed more recently by James Sambrook and Christine Gerrard, among others. Their work has gone far towards enabling us to understand the intellectual, historical and aesthetic context in which Liberty was produced, and to see it as perhaps the most ambitious example of that form so prominent in the period, the progress poem.