Seasons

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2010

The painterly properties of James Thomson's long poem The Seasons (1730) and the poem's descriptiveness were routinely remarked upon by its earliest readers. Dr. Johnson noted: "His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful.. .. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm, that our thoughts expand with his imagery, and kindle with his sentiments." 1 Robert Heron praised the "countless profusion of particular images," while Robert Shiels had denominated description as the "peculiar talent of Thomson." 2 Joseph Warton, among others, hailed the authenticity of Thomson's descriptions but, like Johnson, embedded them in a moral framework, remarking that "pathetic reflection, properly introduced into a descriptive poem, will have a still greater force and beauty, and more deeply interest a reader, than a moral one." 3 Scenes and episodes from Thomson's poem were adapted, visually interpreted, and translated into different media that ranged from Chelsea softpaste candlesticks in the 1750s, Meissen and Derby figurines of allegorical "seasons" (produced throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), porcelain vases and creamware, to sculpture, decorative fireplace and floor

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL), 2023

The world we live in today has become fast-paced, complex, and uncertain with unprecedented environmental, social, and cultural events. This escalating complexity necessitates an alternative way to study and intervene in our world. Nowadays, it is seen that ecological degradation is going on in each and every part of the world. This essay discusses the idea of "Seasons" to reflect upon environmental concerns of the 21st century. It intends to focus on seasons like summer, winter, spring, and autumn to enhance readers' awareness of their physical surroundings through an analysis of Louise Glück's selected poems. The essay will examine Glück's use of the seasons along with landscape imagery, such as gardens, plants, fruits, flowers, animals, etc. to focus on how literature and the natural world collaborate and how humans interact with their surroundings. It includes attempts to theorize the representation by emphasizing relationality in human-environmental interactions. Further, it will highlight the way Glück uses season as a metaphor to see people and their changing lives.

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2013

William B. Hutchings's work on James Thomson's The Seasons (1730-44) marks a significant departure from much of Thomson criticism that examines natural description. 1 He usefully discusses how "Thomson places emphasis upon verbs of motion" and "identif[ies] description with process, beauty with the action of perceiving it," and the "virtual" reality with which his images are endowed. 2 Focusing on the poet's landscapes, Hutchings offers insights into the evocative qualities of Thomson's language and images that are more widely applicable to passages from the poem that would not strictly be characterized as natural description. I wish to extend Hutchings's argument on the complex techniques of the poet's image-making processes by examining some types of images that contribute to generating Thomson's vision of poetic representation. Special attention will be given to the "capacity [of Thomson's images] to provoke the reader's imaginative experience through the power of their language and syntactic organization." 3 Thomson creates images that are tonally and modally determined and that enable him to produce an effectively varied long poem in which he skillfully modulates passages of discourse with passages of description. 4 In doing so, Thomson, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, "varies the principle of realizing the invisible": the "nature of the poetic enterprise makes imagining the most important" capacity in the poet's synesthetic realm of constructed perception. 5 The complex interconnectedness of the various elements of Thomson's poetic images is realized and apprehended with an imaginative exploration of these images' very

All cultures have seasons, an understanding of the cycles of the year, especially the growing, gathering and hunting periods, and the predominantly hot or cold, wet or dry times of the year that are related to those periods, and indeed make them possible. Yet the number and nature of the seasons and their physiological and psychological affects varies widely across cultures. The seasons play an important role in organizing a sense of time, of the progression of the year, of the cycle of the year, and of the years. Their role has also changed over time, especially from Paleolithic hunter-gather societies to Neolithic agricultural ones, and then to modern industrialised ones. The seasons have a history. The term 'season' has a history deriving, as McClatchy (13) points out, from the Latin for 'sowing' and so referring only to spring, and to agricultural societies. The names for the seasons also have a history as it was not until the sixteenth century that their names were stabilised in English, French and German (see Enkvist 90 and 157).

International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, 2024

2018

2004

Accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, from June 22 through September 5, 2004 --P. 9https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/art-museum-exhibition-catalogs/1056/thumbnail.jp

Changing Seasonality How Communities are Revising their Seasons, 2024

In this chapter, I share my personal reflections on changing seasonality through observations in and around the house and home. I relate these thoughts to the subject of domestication, which loosely involves bringing the exterior (outside) world to the more interior (inside) human realm, and along the way transforming the stories we tell about the seasons. I arrive to my views through years of walking, gardening, photography, and travel as well as teaching and writing about philosophy and environmental studies, including the recent publication of a book entitled The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives.