: The Unfolding of The Seasons (1970)

First published in 1970, this is a critical study providing an interpretation and evaluation of James Thomson's poem The Seasons. Professor Cohen urges its reconsideration as a major Augustan poem, arguing that Thomson's unity, diction, and thought combine with a conception of man, nature, and God which is poetically tenable and distinctive. Professor Cohen shows that Thomson's great achievement is to have fashioned a conception which, by bringing nature into the forefront of his poem, became a new poetic way of defining human experience. Thomson was not the first nature poet in English, but he was the first to provide an effective idiom in which science, orthodox religion, natural description, and classical allusion blended to describe the glory, baseness, and uncertainty of man's earthly environment, holding forth the hope of heavenly love and wisdom.