James Thomson
From Commonplace Book
The City of Dreadful Night
- most famous C19 atheist poem
- "benumbs the sense" - Shelley? Keats?
- XVI - sermon of atheism
- the poem's power lies in length and the various modes he uses
- rhythmically various but returning to that heartbeat of iambic pentameter
- change but no comfort
- a metapoetic statement in the proem: not for comfort but for protest
- Thomson's atheism inflected by the religious writing of other Victorian poets (he loved the religious poetry of the Brownings)
