Thomson's Entropic Noiseuse: Destructive Chaos in James Thomson's The Seasons.

This paper examines how James Thomson's long poem The Seasons, particularly its subsection "Autumn," depicts scenes of chaos that both draw and diverge from conceptions of chaos in John Milton's Paradise Lost. It argues that while the Miltonic tradition portrays chaos as separate from the providentially ordered creation, Thomson incorporates a form of destructive chaos into his vision of nature that resonates with the later scientific concept of entropy. However, through allusions to the biblical chaos of Milton's Paradise Lost, "Autumn" links its scenes of dissolution to a larger cosmic cycle of destruction and creation by which order falls to primordial chaos in order to allow for repeated creations. Ultimately, through these returns to chaos and renewals of creation, "Autumn" imagines a temporality of rises and falls that diverges from the providential teleology of Paradise Lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]