Faith, Doubt and Despair in William Cowper's Selected Poetry and Prose

Summary

Introduction

Cowper's Popularity in the Past

From a modern perspective it may seem surprising that William Cowper (1731–1800), occupying a safe but modest place in English literary history as a poet of the Age of Sensibility or a PreRomantic, was from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth “the most widely read – at least, in England – of any English poet” (Newey 1982: 1). Between 1782 – the year of his literary debut – and 1837 – the year of the publication of Robert Southey's Life and Works of Cowper (in fifteen volumes) – there were over a hundred editions of his poetry in Britain, and nearly fifty in America. Although his first individual volume of poems, published when he was fifty one, won no great acclaim (it contained mostly his “Moral Satires”), The Task (1785), a poem in six books, written in blank verse, combining mockheroic with sentimental and moralistic elements, immediately achieved a status of the poet's masterpiece. By 1812 Cowper's publisher Joseph Johnson profited enormously from selling the poet's works (the sale brought him around 10 000 pounds).

The Romantics, especially Byron, saw Cowper's fame as earned mostly due to the spirit of the times: the Evangelical Revival of the late eighteenth century, which promoted humanitarian values and emotional zeal as well as religious rebirth, created an audience for his poetry, unlikely to be so numerous at any other time (Hartley 1960: 6).