James Thomson, born about 11 September 1700 at Ednam in Roxburghshire and dead on 27 August 1748 at Richmond in Surrey, was among the most consequential poets of eighteenth-century Britain. A Scottish writer who made his career in London, he achieved a rare combination of popularity, literary innovation, and long afterlife. His great poem, The Seasons, led English readers away from the tightly controlled urban wit an…
“How gay looks the Spring! how glorious the Summer! how pleasing the Autumn! and how venerable the Winter!”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
William Collins, born in Chichester on 25 December 1721 and dead there on 12 June 1759, occupies a small but luminous space in English literary history. He published little, lived only thirty-seven years, and spent much of his adult life under the shadow of debt, disappointment, and severe mental distress. Yet a handful of poems, especially the odes issued in 1746, have secured him a place among the most distinctive…
“I have but one book, but that is the best.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Tenderness
