THOMSON, JAMES. — English poet, born at Ednan, in Scotland, in September 1700, died at Richmond on 27 August 1748.
In 1730 he accompanied to France and Italy, as tutor (a few years earlier he had abandoned the prospect of an ecclesiastical career), the son of Sir Charles Talbot, from whom he later obtained an important position. His most notable work is the poem The Seasons (1725–30), in blank verse (and not in rhyming couplets, the metre then in vogue), in which there emerges a sensitivity to landscape and a taste for the picturesque that here and there, in certain respects, anticipate the nature-inspired poetry of the pre-Romantics and even of Wordsworth.
Also remembered are The Castle of Indolence
(1748), inspired by his residence in Richmond, in melodious Spenserian stanzas, and the highly popular patriotic song Rule Britannia!, which cannot, however, be attributed to him with certainty, since it appears in a masque: Alfred (1740), which he composed in collaboration with David Maller. T. influenced Keats and Tennyson.
He suffered poverty, especially during childhood, and experienced other misfortunes, including the death of a girl he loved. In life he was an anarchically inclined freethinker and addicted to alcohol. He is known for a poem pervaded by a more despairing and nihilistic pessimism than Leopardi’s and inspired by the conviction of the uselessness of existence: The city of dreadful night, in which he sings of an imaginary city inhabited by the shipwrecked remnants of life and hope. The poem is uneven but powerful in some of its verses. T. signed himself B. V., that is, B. for Bysshe (Shelley) and V. for Vanolis, an anagram of Novalis, two of the poets he particularly admired.