Poetry of the Transition School.
[The Transition Period]. [James Thomson]. [The Seasons]. [The Castle of Indolence]. [Mark Akenside]. [Pleasures of the Imagination]. [Thomas Gray]. [The Elegy]. [The Bard]. [William Cowper]. [The Task]. [Translation of Homer]. [Other Writers].
The Transition Period.
The poetical standards of Dryden and Pope, as poetic examples and arbiters, exercised tyrannical sway to the middle of the eighteenth century, and continued to be felt, with relaxing influence, however, to a much later period. Poetry became impatient of too close a captivity to technical rules in rhythm and in subjects, and began once again to seek its inspiration from the worlds of nature and of feeling. While seeking this change, it passed through what has been properly called the period of transition,—a period the writers of which are distinctly marked as belonging neither to the artificial classicism of Pope, nor to the simple naturalism of Wordsworth and the Lake school; partaking, indeed, in some degree of the former, and preparing the way for the latter.
The excited condition of public feeling during the earlier period, incident to the accession of the house of Hanover and the last struggles of the Jacobites, had given a political character to every author, and a political significance to almost every literary work. At the close of this abnormal condition of things, the poets of the transition school began their labors; untrammelled by the court and the town, they invoked the muse in green fields and by babbling brooks; from materialistic philosophy in verse they appealed through the senses to the hearts of men; and appreciation and popularity rewarded and encouraged them.
James Thomson.—The first distinguished writer of this school was Thomson, the son of a Scottish minister. He was born on the 11th of September, 1700, at Ednam in Roxburghshire. While a boy at school in Jedburgh, he displayed poetical talent: at the University of Edinburgh he completed his scholastic course, and studied divinity; which, however, he did not pursue as a profession. Being left, by his father's death, without means, he resolved to go to the great metropolis to try his fortunes. He arrived in London in sorry plight, without money, and with ragged shoes; but through the assistance of some persons of station, he procured occupation as tutor to a lord's son, and thus earned a livelihood until the publication of his first poem in 1726. That poem was Winter, the first of the series called The Seasons: it was received with unusual favor. The first edition was speedily exhausted, and with the publication of the second, his position as a poet was assured. In 1727 he produced the second poem of the series, Summer, and, with it, a proposal for issuing the Four Seasons, with a Hymn on their succession. In 1728 his Spring appeared, and in the next year an unsuccessful tragedy called Sophonisba, which owed its immediate failure to the laughter occasioned by the line,
O Sophonisba, Sophonisba O!
This was parodied by some wag in these words:
O Jemmie Thomson, Jemmie Thomson O!
and the ridicule was so potent that the play was ruined.