Cowper

From The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson. (Period of the French Revolution)

IV. COWPER

William Cowper (1731-1800) was a sweet, simple, instinctive poet, whom we should refuse to accept, at anybody's bidding, as the leader, or forerunner, or anticipator of something called "the romantic revolt". Only bad poets deliberately strive for dissidence and difference. What matters in poetry is, simply, poetry, not theories of poetry, even when promulgated by poets. Cowper, certainly, was not a revolutionary of any kind. His inclinations were towards the past, not towards some undiscerned "poetry of the future". He was not a "modern; his admired master was Milton, whose poems in foreign languates he has most excellently and usefully translated for less learned generations. Cowper wrote just the sort of poetry that it was natural for him to write, as Pope wrote just the sort of poetry that it was natural for him to write. Pope and Cowper did not write the same kind of poetry, because they were not interested in the same kind of things; but that difference does not require us to set one poet against the other. What matters only is the absolute worth of what they wrote. Cowper, indeed, exclaimed, "God made the country and man made the town"; but Cowper's charge against Pope was not that he was an artificial poet of the town, but that by his very excellence in verse he

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.

The events in the life of Cowper were few but remarkable. He was born of a good family and was sent to Westminster School, where, like Gibbon, he was unhappy. One of his masters was Vincent Bourne, whose Latin poems he translated, and one of his friends was Charles Churchill, whose satirical poems he praised. From Westminster he passed in 1750 to a study of law, and led a normal and apparently happy life. He flirted with his cousins Harriet and Theodora, the latter of whom he wanted to marry; the former was to come into his life years after. The proposed marriage was forbidden by Theodora's father, first because of the consanguinity and next because of William's disquieting tendency to morbidity. The cousins were forbidden to meet or even to correspond, and when to this disappointment in love was added the death of Cowper's father and the accidental drowning of his best friend, his mind became deranged and he attempted suicide. 

When the doors of a private asylum closed upon William Cowper at the age of thirty-two, his life in the busy world of men appeared to have come to an end; but two years later he was well enough to pass into the care of Morley Unwin, a retired clergyman, and his wife Mary. When Unwin was accidentally killed, Mary devoted herself to the delicate poet, and their long association is one of the famous frienships in literary history. Unfortunately they moved from Huntingdon to the less pleasant Olney, in order to receive the religious ministrations of the celebrated John Newton, once in the slave trade, but now a convinced Evangelical. One happy result came from the new association, namely, Cowper's collaboration with Newton in Olney Hymns (1779), a collection which included Newton's How sweet the name of Jesus and Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. When Newton left in the next year for a London living, Cowper found himself without occupation—the poet in him lacked a stimulus for expression. But Mary encouraged him to write. His first long poem Anti-Thelyphthora (1781) has only temporary interest. Mrs Unwin next proposed as a subject the progress of error; and going eagerly to work, Cowper wrote eight satires: Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation and Retirement. But the gentle reculse who had never lived in the world could not write bitterly, even with the unseen spirit of Newton prompting him. However, the clear, neat verses were achieved and were published in the volume called Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782), which contained as well some of the short poems by which he is generally remembered.

A new friend, Lady Austen, came into Cowper's life in 1781 and touched his spirits and his poetry to finer issues. She was a woman of the world, and knew that Cowper needed diversion, not preoccupation with moral problems; and the subject she lightly suggested for a poem was the sofa in his room—perhaps she had been reading Crébillon. Cowper gaily accepted the challenge, and the result was one of the happiest and friendliest of English poems, The Task,  in six books, The Sofa, The Time-piece, The Garden, The Winter Evening, The Winter Morning Walk and The Winter Walk at Noon, with their exquisite vignettes of landscape. Cowper's love of nature was the love that asks no questions and poses no problems. His poems are the simple artistic record of simple, genuine experience. The tendency to didacticism , natural to a man of Cowper's experience, is present in The Task, but we cheerfully accept his teaching, if only because it has been his own support in trouble. The love of man for man, the love of man for animals, for the meanest thing that lives—this is the principal moral message of The Task. Rousseau, no doubt, had said something like it before, and Rousseau was in the air. But in Cowper it is the natural underived expression of hi own tender, affectionate nature, and no English poet has given it such perfect utterance. When published in 1785, The Task was followed in the same volume by Tirocinium and The Diverting Story of John Gilpin. In Tirocinium the attack on the brutality and immorality of public schools may have been just and is certainly vigorous; but this is not the kind of poetical composition in which Cowper excelled. Of John Gilpin there is no need to speak. Everyone knows that immortal story. Later editions of his poems included the exquisitely tender lines On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture out of Norfolk. She had died when he was six years old. 

In 1786 Cowper and Mrs Unwin moved from dreary Olney to a cheerful house and neighbourhood at Weston, and enlarged their circle of acquaintances, thanks, partly, to his cousin Harriet, now Lady Hesketh. Cowper's life continued to be happy; and during these pleasant years he wrote a number of his best short poems, which were not published till after his death. His translation of Homer (1791) is a kind of protest against Pope's, which he rejected as too artificial. But Cowper, in trying to make Homer dignified made him dull. The greatest merit of his version is that it kept him for a time from the despair which was to destroy him in the end. Mrs Unwin sickened in 1791 and her life of heroic devotion drew to its close in 1796. After that Cowper was past help, past cure. Popularity, success, affection could do nothing to lighten the darkness within. His last original work is the powerful and ghastly poem called The Castaway. 

Cowper is a minor poet, but he is a poet who must be read. Not to know him is to miss a creative "character", an engaging combination of lovableness, simplicity and charm. There is no more companionable poet than Cowper. The egregious William Hayley wrote his life and first made known to English readers the treasure of Cowper's letters—Southey's later edition is much better. Like everything else about him, they are unique. They are so simple that anybody could have written them; but the fact is that nobody has written anything like them. Like a charming companion on a day's ramble he talks delightfully about anything—or nothing. his letters had a modern edition in five volumes (1904-25) by Thomas Wright of Olney; the best modern biography is David Cecil's The Stricken Deer (1929); Gilbert Thomas's William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century (1935) relates the poet to his time.

William Cowper

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