Ralph Cohen: Analyst of the Literary Field

Put the case that there is a poem popular in its own time and for decades after its publication. Put the case that this popularity expressed itself in widespread quotation, so that the poem was frequently pulverized, so that it appeared in the form of epigraphs and other brief excerpts that larded other texts. Put the case that the circulation of these bits did not enhance appreciation for the poem at its full extent, as it did in the case of Shakespeare's plays. And, finally, put the case that critics like William Wordsworth found its popularity suspect and that various influential twentieth-century critics—including T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Reuben Brower— argued that the poem had not simply lost its place in the canon but that serious aesthetic judgment justified its banishment.

The poem is James Thomson's The Seasons. Published in the years between 1730 and 1746 as a complete poem, its first installment, Winter, had appeared in 1726, its second, Summer, in 1727.¹ Confronted with the story of the waning enthusiasm for the poem, what would you, a highly trained literary scholar, do? Many thought that the answer to that question was clear: the poem should be allowed to languish unread. In various formulations, they all suggested that The Seasons was not a poem on which serious persons should spend much of their valuable time; it should simply figure in footnotes that composted Thomson's poem and listed it as a trace element in other, better poetry.

Against the influential disparagements of The Seasons, it was of course easy to imagine simply projecting contrarian views. Some enthusiastic admirer of its descriptions of landscape might have mounted an insistent defense of the poem's transhistorical literary value; someone might have written the history of the changes in taste that separated the eighteenth-century readers of the poetry of The Seasons from later readers conscious of their own sophistication. Surprisingly, however, the poem came to be of particular interest to a few critics—Patricia Meyer Spacks, in her The Varied God: A Critical Study of Thomson's "The Seasons" (1959) and The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (1967);² Ralph Cohen, in his The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism (1964) and The Unfolding of the Seasons (1970);³ and John Barrell, in his English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (1983)⁴—who found it particularly intriguing precisely because, in losing its popularity, it was no longer compelled to assume the position of the poem-available-only-for-unalloyed-admiration. For these critics, Thomson's poem opened questions about how one engages with poems that had not been branded with the stamp of perfection that a place in the literary canon secured. Its supporters were, in the main, long dead; its detractors had summarily dismissed it. It presented the opportunity for reading with minimal interference from received opinion and thus of confronting questions of literary judgment and value anew.

The other studies I have mentioned are impressive works of criticism, but Ralph Cohen's The Art of Discrimination is in a category by itself. It is a serious and sustained experiment in tracking an extraordinary range of literary reactions and in using The Seasons as a case study for the examination of literary taste. Cohen undertook to attend closely to the poem and just as closely to the discussions of it. Neither leaving the poem undefended nor overdefending it, he began by recognizing the importance of the fact that there had been two hundred years of writing on and about the poem—that the poem had emerged in the full light of criticism and that writing about it thus represented a significant critical archive. From that insight, he developed the view that the poem might serve as a way of getting at what he exactly called "the principles and practice of criticism" (AD 1). Neither simply "a history of English criticisms of The Seasons" nor a study of "changes in Thomson's reputation and in literary taste from 1750 to...