Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it is worth noting that Dyer
belonged to Wales, and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more significant
that Dyer was by profession a painter, and that Thomson's poems were
influenced by memories of the fashionable school of landscape painting.
The development of Romantic poetry in the eighteenth century is
inseparably associated with pictorial art, and especially with the rise
of landscape painting. Two great masters of the seventeenth century,
Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, are more important than all the rest.
We have here to do not with the absolute merits of painting, nor with its
technical beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on the popular
imagination, which in this matter does not much differ from the poetic
imagination. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Claude were made
familiar to an enormous public by the process of engraving, and poetry
followed where painting led. There are exquisite landscapes in the
backgrounds of the great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and others;
but now the background became the picture, and the groups of figures were
reduced to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Exactly the same
change, the same shift of the centre of interest, may be seen in
Thomson's poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt it would be difficult
to balance the creditor and debtor account as between poetry and
painting; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed some hints from the
older romances; but in England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks, and
calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by the glow of the setting sun were
familiar before the reaction in poetry set in.


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