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University Microfilms, a XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan | JAMES THOMSON AND THE SUBLIME Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Cohen, Michael, 1943- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 05/10/2021 15:04:06 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/287789 72-2166 COHEN, Michael Martin, 1943- JAMES THOMSON AND THE SUBLIME. The University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan | THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFLIMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED JAMES THOMSON AND THE SUBLIME by Michael Martin Cohen A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my Michael Martin Cohen direction by "James Thomson and the Sublime" entitled be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the Doctor of Philosophy degree of A/MU 'ITaM /s L t% { Dissertation Dikector¥• Date \ I f "5 After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:"" ^ ^ )c*^hn. 7/W 7/ •Ula Am* MM J-UhpL. ivy 7ft 1 ft' This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial ful­ fillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowl­ edgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the inter­ ests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, per­ mission must be obtained from the author SIGNED: PLEASE NOTE: Some Pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS PREFACE The pages which follow do not attempt to set up any startlingly new viewpoint from which to look at eighteenth- century literature, nor do they try to persuade anyone who doubts Thomson's merit that he was the most impressive poet of his era. They merely embody my conviction that intel­ lectual history—in this case the admirable work done on the idea of sublimity by Samuel Holt Monk and others—is of little value unless it helps us to better understand the writings of individual authors. I wish to thank Professor Oliver Sigworth, my director, for his encouragement, his help, and most of all his patience. The directors of the Huntington Library and the University of Illinois Rare Book Room allowed me to read and examine many works otherwise inaccessible to me, for which I thank them. iii TABLE OP CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT . v 1. INTRODUCTORY 1 2. THE RHETORICAL SUBLIME 10 Mil tonic Imitation . 13 "The Peculiar Language of Heaven": Scripture and the Style of the Sublime Mode 30 The Sublime Mode: Other Features 52 3. THE NATURAL SUBLIME ....... 80 "The Smiling God": The Beauty of Nature ... 92 The Justification of the Sublime Aspects of Nature 100 The Argument from Design, Intricacy, and Harmony 117 1|— THE THEME OP LIBERTY 129 5. THE PRESCRIPTIVE SUBLIME 169 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 192 iv ABSTRACT Thomson combined the rhetorical and the natural sub­ lime to create a new mode of poetry which won the approba­ tion of eighteenth-century critics, who praised his sublimity more often than any other element in his poetry. To develop a suitable style for his two great subjects, nature and political liberty, he adopted features from Milton, from scriptural verse, and from the poetry of his own age. Thomson imitated Milton's stately tone, his cata­ logues, his syntactic peculiarities, and specific lines from his poetry; Thomson needed a sublime style, and Milton's had been judged sublime by Gildon, Dennis, Addison, Welsted, and others. From scriptural verse Thomson adopted specific phrases as well as an emotional intensity which character­ izes parts of the Bible; long acquaintance with the scrip­ tures may have led him to the syncretizing theme of The Seasons and influenced its method of composition. Prom con­ temporary poetry Thomson incorporated other features conducive to sublimity as the early eighteenth century saw it: periphrasis, repetition, accumulation of detail, per­ sonification, and a vocabulary which emphasized the power and limitlessness of nature, all of which allowed the poet to express the profusion of nature while still regarding its vi order. Thomson's synthesis of stylistic elements from these three sources created a poetic mode at once imitative and unique, specifically tailored for sublime subject matter and assured of a familiar and favorable reception by the poet's contemporaries. Thomson's descriptions of the natural world empha­ sized boundlessness (a major desideratum of the sublime), beauty, usefulness, intricacy, and harmony, showing how all these attributes pointed to a creator. Nature thus became a sublime subject because it was a sacred subject. The Seasons also contained unresolved elements, and these empha­ sized not the beauty or usefulness of nature, but her some­ times inexplicable terror. In his later work Thomson used the rhetoric and vocabulary of the sublime to treat the subject of political liberty, which also had the testimony of sublimity from earlier writers such as Wotton, Dennis, and Addison. In his poetry and plays, liberty is opposed by corruption, licen­ tiousness, and the unchecked sway of the passions, threats which Thomson describes in images of natural disorder. In the plays, especially, rampant passions are described in metaphors from nature as sublime and terrible; by contrast, nature smiles upon those portions of the earth where social harmony exists. The Gothic translatio—the idea that the unsophisticated invaders from the north were the transmitters vii of liberty from classical Rome to modern Europe—furnished Thomson with another metaphor for his feelings about the connections of liberty, virtue, and the wild landscapes that constituted the natural sublime. Thomson's conviction that giving a poem a subject considered sublime would invariably result in sublime poetry--ref±ected in his appraisal of Liberty as his great­ est work and in his letters to Mallet—represented the beginning of the hardening of the concept of sublimity into critical prescript!visra. Instead of operating to free poets and critics from the constraint of neoclassical "rules," the later sublime merely substituted one set of dicta for another—Boileau's Longinus for Boileau's Horace. Thomson was influential in turning Longinus' emphasis on qualities in the writer into concern only with the subject and style of the work, making possible a very mechanical application of the idea of sublimity. But though his imitators were quick to find in his topics and treatment a prescription for sublimity, Thomson's initiation of the sublime mode is important to English literary history because it widened the scope of accepted eighteenth-century forms and opened new areas for poetic exploration. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY "Sublimity" and "sublime" are the words most fre­ quently used in describing Thomson's poetry by critics in the eighteenth century.^ Thomson's biographer, Patrick Murdoch, said that the sublime was the quality "by which his works will be forever distinguished"; his patron Lyttelton, who had inscribed "Poetae sublimis" on Thomson's memorial in Hagley Park, also has pope say in the Dialogues of the Dead that the poet's imagination was "rich, extensive, sublime."^ Douglas Grant quotes a 1726 correspondent to the London Journal who praises Thomson's "true Sublimity" and an admirer writing in The Present State of the Republick of 1. During this period "sublime" could refer to 1) a rhetorical ideal—the most exalted of styles, 2) the conceptual power of literary geniuses of ancient and modern times, and 3) huge and impressive objects in nature which inspired the mind to grand thoughts and were treated by poets in an elevated style. The etymology of the word "sub­ lime," the influence of Longinus' treatise on sublimity (Peri Hupsos). and the history of the sublime in seven­ teenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century England are treated in Samuel Holt Monk's The Sublime (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935? rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). 2. Patrick Murdoch, "Life of Thomson," in The Works of James Thomson (London: A. Millar, 1762), I, iv. Lyttel­ ton's memorial to the poet is described in Rose Mary Davis' The Good Lord Lyttelton (Bethlehem, Pa.: Times Publishing Co., 1939), p. 173» PTalogues of the Dead (London: W. Sandby, 1760), p. 129. 1 2 Letters who finds the poet excelling in "the real sublime. John Holmes' Art of Rhetorick (1739), which included a sum­ mary of the sublime as it had been described by Longinus, uses Thomsons poetry for illustrations of Longinus1 tenets, as Leonard Welsted's earlier treatise had used Milton.^" Mid-century critics like Joseph Warton also considered The Seasons a sublime poem, and Samuel Holt Monk is convinced that Thomson affected later commentators on the sublime such £ as John Baillie and Burke.
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