Tags: Poem.
The Castle of Indolence is a poem written by James Thomson a Scottish poet of the 18th century in 1748.According to the Nuttall Encyclopedia the Castle of Indolence is a place in which the dwellers live amid luxurious delights to the enervation of soul and body. The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas at a time when they were considered outdated and initiated an interest in this stanza form which would later have a strong influence upon the English Romantic poets Lord Byron William Wordsworth and John Keats.Washington Irving quotes the first four lines of Canto I VI (lines 46-49 in external link excerpt below) from the poem in his tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.