SOURCE: "Collins, Thomson, and the Whig Progress of Liberty," in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 553–77.

In the excerpt below, Levine compares Thomson's Liberty with William Collins's "Ode to Liberty."

Liberty, James Thomson's nearly 3500-line blank verse "poetical vision" that recounts the Whiggish progress of European civilization and the triumphs of British freedom, has been almost unanimously viewed as one of his greatest aesthetic failures, a poem that Johnson once "tried to read, and soon desisted." To this day, interest in the poem remains mostly historical, perhaps unjustly. For not only did Thomson incorporate sections of this panoramic didactic poem into his later, expanded versions of The Seasons, but mid-eighteenth-century British poets also acknowledged this most extensive of progress pieces as a central work of patriotic poetry. In December 1746, twelve years after the first books of Liberty were published, William Collins offered his 144-line Pindaric "Ode...