Between 1726 and 1730, the Scottish poet James Thomson published the four books of The Seasons — Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter — which collectively constituted the most ambitious descriptive poem in the English language to that date, with detailed passages on winds, storms, and atmospheric phenomena across the British Isles. Thomson's poem, revised and expanded through multiple editions until 1746, drew on contemporary meteorological science, particularly the Newtonian tradition, while also drawing on classical wind mythology and pastoral traditions. Published in London, The Seasons was one of the best-selling poems of the entire eighteenth century.

The Seasons directly shaped the Romantic movement's engagement with wind and weather as primary poetic subject matter: Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley all acknowledged Thomson's influence, and the poem's detailed wind descriptions established the template for the English landscape poem in which meteorological precision and emotional resonance are fused. The poem was set to music by Haydn as an oratorio, extending its cultural reach beyond purely literary circles. Thomson's treatment of winds as morally and aesthetically significant natural forces was the crucial bridge between Augustan science-poetry and Romantic nature poetry.