James Thomson's The Seasons: Descriptive Didacticism or Contradiction and Incoherency
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Critics have been divided in their views as to whether James Thomson's The Seasons stands coherent in structure and theme and also if the poem should be classified in terms of being descriptive or didactic in tone. This paper focuses on the crucial issue concerning the nature of contradiction and incoherence and, further, examines the problem concerning self-contradictory visions of the social city and natural country. Such visions, unqualified by either preceding or following passages, provide the poem with an inconclusive ending and message to the reader. Within the varied vicissitudes of The Seasons such moments of optimistic affirmation or of pessimistic prophecy remain not only unexplained but also disconnected even in the final, closing poetic depiction of the social world. This study therefore not only examines the contradictions and incoherency within The Seasons but also, further, questions the purpose behind oscillating and recurring contradictions and incoherency, by looking at the didactic yet descriptive narrative structure of the poem. The analysis concludes by looking at how the “bounded view” of “reason's eye” produces a poetic depiction of the social world and questions whether or not the poem reaches it own satisfactory closure in the end.
Abstract
Critics have been divided in their views as to whether James Thomson's The Seasons stands coherent in structure and theme and also if the poem should be classified in terms of being descriptive or didactic in tone. This paper focuses on the crucial issue concerning the nature of contradiction and incoherence and, further, examines the problem concerning self-contradictory visions of the social city and natural country. Such visions, unqualified by either preceding or following passages, provide the poem with an inconclusive ending and message to the reader. Within the varied vicissitudes of The Seasons such moments of optimistic affirmation or of pessimistic prophecy remain not only unexplained but also disconnected even in the final, closing poetic depiction of the social world. This study therefore not only examines the contradictions and incoherency within The Seasons but also, further, questions the purpose behind oscillating and recurring contradictions and incoherency, by looking at the didactic yet descriptive narrative structure of the poem. The analysis concludes by looking at how the “bounded view” of “reason's eye” produces a poetic depiction of the social world and questions whether or not the poem reaches it own satisfactory closure in the end.
참고문헌 (20)
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