Dr. Johnson made his biography of Cowley an opportunity for numerous generalizations about those whom he christened “the metaphysical poets,” including the claim that “Their attempts were always analytick; they broke every image into fragments: and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he, who dissects a sun-beam with a prism, can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.” Margaret Anne Doody hears these words as “implicitly a comparison of an old kind of poetry with the modern” and one favoring the latter with “a simile very much in the style— indeed almost an echo— of Thomson,” which she finds all the more appropriate because “Augustan poetry (such as Thomson's at its best) bursts upon us with ‘wide effulgence’ and the hot richness of ‘a summer noon.’ “ Though her conception of Augustanism encompasses the long eighteenth century, she follows Johnson in perceiving only one side of the Janus-headed profile that T. S. Eliot assigned to Cowley: “an early Augustan as well as a late metaphysical.” But the author of Davideis hardly shunned “wide effulgence” when evoking “a place o’reflown with hallowed Light.” Whereas Cowley only sometimes aligned such phenomena with the mimetic prosody that Johnson designated “scientifick versification,” James Thomson in effect made “a summer noon” synonymous with his entire output as a poet. Commencing his much reworked sequence The Seasons (1726– 46) with Winter, he prefaced the second edition of that poem by explaining how “weak-sighted gentlemen” alone “cannot bear the strong light of poetry,” thus consoling himself about “the wintry world of letters,” as if the accompanying material represented an allegory about taste instead of extensively describing one part of the year.

Without naming Cowley, Shaun Irlam nonetheless gives two reasons for numbering him among Thomson's precursors: “I hypothesize that close affinities exist between the forms of religious Enthusiasm impugned in the late seventeenth century and the forms of poetic Enthusiasm first reclaimed by Thomson and Young and subsequently a number of others, including Collins, Gray, Smart, Cowper, Blake, and the Wartons, in the eighteenth century.”.