Descriptive Poetry - After Thomson

After Thomson

He was widely imitated in England, especially by Armstrong, Akenside, Shenstone (in The Schoolmistress, 1742), by the anonymous author of Albania, 1737 and by Oliver Goldsmith (in The Deserted Village, 1770). No better example of the more pedestrian class of descriptive poetry could be found than the last-mentioned poem with its minute and Dutch-like painting. How often have I paused on every charm:

The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm;

The never-failing brook, the busy mill,

The decent church that topped the neighboring hill:

The hawthorn-bush, with seats beneath the shade

For talking age and whispering lovers made.

On the continent of Europe the example of Thomson was almost immediately fruitful. Four several translations of The Seasons into French contended for the suffrages of the public. Jean François de Saint-Lambert (1716–1803) imitated Thomson in Les Saisons (1769), a poem that enjoyed popularity for half a century, and of which Voltaire said that it was the only one of its generation that would reach posterity. Nevertheless, as Madame du Deffand told Walpole, Saint-Lambert is froid, fade et faux and the same may be said of Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745–1794) who wrote Les Mois in 1779, a descriptive poem famous in its day.

The Abbé Jacques Delille (1738–1813), perhaps the most ambitious descriptive poet who has ever lived, was treated as a Virgil by his contemporaries. He published Les Géorgiques in 1769, Les Jardins in 1782 and L' Homme des champs in 1803, but he went furthest in his brilliant, though artificial Trois règnes de la nature (1809), which French critics have called the masterpiece of this whole school of descriptive poetry. Delille, however, like Thomson before him, was unable to avoid monotony and want of coherency. Picture follows picture and no progress is made. The satire of Marie Joseph Chénier in his famous and witty Discours sur les poèmes descriptifs, brought the vogue of this species of poetry to an end.

In England, again, Wordsworth, who treated the genius of Thomson with unmerited severity, revived descriptive poetry in a form that owed more than Wordsworth realized to the model of The Seasons. In The Excursion and The Prelude, as well as in many of his minor pieces, Wordsworth's philosophical and moral intentions cannot prevent the reader from perceiving the large part that pure description takes. The same may be said of much of the early blank verse of Coleridge.