William Cowper
1731–1800
Biography
William Cowper (1731–1800) was an English poet and hymn writer. He was born at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire and trained for the law, but a severe depression, which led to his confinement in an asylum, altered the course of his life. After his recovery he turned to an intense evangelical faith, and for some years he lived at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he collaborated with the clergyman John Newton on the Olney Hymns. His religious verse was written in the shadow of his own fears about salvation, and those fears also run through his letters.
Cowper's reputation rests above all on The Task, a long poem in blank verse published in 1785. Its six books begin with a comic meditation on the sofa and move outward to walks through the countryside, the changing seasons, the work of the land and reflections on public life and manners. In its easy, conversational lines he showed that ordinary domestic and rural life could be a serious subject for poetry, and Coleridge and Wordsworth both admired him. He is also remembered for the comic ballad The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782) and for his poems against slavery, among them The Negro's Complaint (1788), which was still being quoted in the twentieth century.
The Task, and Other Poems, on this site, is the volume that carries that long poem. Its pages show Cowper's careful eye for English fields, gardens and winter evenings, and his wish to make verse out of things that others might have thought too small. Read it for the plainness and warmth of the voice, and for the sense of a man who knew how fragile a mind could be and wrote with a calm he had worked hard to find.
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Books
The Task, and Other Poems
by William Cowper
Cowper's blank-verse Task takes up a sofa, a timepiece, a garden and the winter evenings and walks of the English countryside, and meditates on rural life and the moral state of England. The volume also has the comic ballad of John Gilpin's ride and the poet's lines To Mary.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.