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Selected Poems
In this selection, which includes short poems and extracts from the longer ones, there is ample evidence of the quality of Cowper's faith and of his eye and ear for nature. Indicative of how his life was sustained by writing, these poems reveal his effort to engage in discourse with friends and with the natural world.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
About the author
William Cowper
1,198 books48 followersWilliam Cowper (1731-1800) was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak. He was a nephew of the poet Judith Madan.
Cowper suffered from severe manic depression, and although he found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity, the inspiration behind his much-loved hymns, he often experienced doubt and feared that he was doomed to eternal damnation. His religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace) led to much of the poetry for which he is best remembered.
Cowper suffered from severe manic depression, and although he found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity, the inspiration behind his much-loved hymns, he often experienced doubt and feared that he was doomed to eternal damnation. His religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace) led to much of the poetry for which he is best remembered.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 14, 2022
·William Cowper, Selected Poems (ed. Nick Rhodes), Carcanet 2003
·William Cowper, The Centenary Letters (ed. Simon Malpas), Carcanet 2000
Cowper is more or less ignored now except by specialists, but at one time he was considered one of the greatest poets of his age. Perhaps this isn't saying much (there weren't a lot of great poets in the late eighteenth century), but still, his neglect is a shame: unlike some forgotten names, Cowper actually seems rather well suited to modern sensibilities. He wrote in a very natural, conversational register, which disguised his perfect mastery of classical forms; and the things that animated him – animal rights, mental health, opposition to hunting and slavery – were rare at the time but are now mainstream, making him feel remarkably pioneering.
Brought up to be a lawyer, he had a kind of breakdown while preparing to take the bar, and made the first of what would be many attempts at suicide. Committed to St Albans asylum, he had a religious epiphany and became a convert to Evangelicalism, moving to rural Buckinghamshire and living more or less in seclusion with a widowed friend called Mary Unwin, who was a lot older than him and perhaps a kind of mother-surrogate (his own mother had died when he was six). Despite recurring bouts of depression and existential terror, he was fairly happy there, and later said that one of the aims of his poetry was ‘to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure, as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue’.
His own overtly religious poetry is still sung as hymns today, and some lines have passed into common language (‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform’). He also wrote a lot of what we'd now call light verse – comic lyrics and mock-heroic poems. But he's most successful, I think, and most influential, when he's in a more thoughtful or serious mode. He writes really well about his own struggles with depression and insanity, capturing his religious terror in some striking imagery:
His longest and best work, The Task, covers his mental distress, conversion to Evangelicalism, and his thoughts on many of the hot topics of the day. Written in blank verse, it's somewhat Miltonic, except that the language is much simpler and clearer. It was plainly a huge influence on Wordsworth's The Prelude, and more generally on the language of the early Romantics. Cowper writes with the lovely sense of talking naturally on paper; his lines have a conversational rhythm which is very easy to follow.
His own search for companionship was sometimes difficult. He never married, and indeed backed out of two potential engagements; perhaps he preferred men, but there were some cloaked suggestions after he died that he had had a genital malformation, or perhaps some kind of intersex condition (in his posthumously published memoir, he refers to himself as a ‘barren fig-tree’). Some male critics talked of his work in coded references to his ‘sensibility’ or (less coded) his ‘effeminacy’. Female readers, however, loved him. Charlotte Smith dedicated one of her long poems to him, and filled her novels with Cowper references; so did Jane Austen (indeed many Copwer readers nowadays seem to come to him from Austen). He was basically a rare male version of the ‘poet of sensibility’.
Much like the painter Henry Fuseli (who was linked to him on several projects, though they apparently never met), Cowper maybe suffers from being so transitional, tending to get described by critics as either a late, degraded Neo-Classicist or an unformed ‘pre-Romantic’. This is unfair. When he's good, he's really very good indeed, and his letters are among the most chatty and revealing of the age. It's just a shame his life story trended so strongly downwards: by his final years, he was gripped by existential horror again, writing to absent friends about the sheer pain of having been born:
It's such a long way from the amiable banter of his early correspondence. But Cowper knew that all things were finite, and indeed captured the idea better than most:
But don't let his secret sleep before it needs to – do yourself a favour, and check him out.
·William Cowper, The Centenary Letters (ed. Simon Malpas), Carcanet 2000
Cowper is more or less ignored now except by specialists, but at one time he was considered one of the greatest poets of his age. Perhaps this isn't saying much (there weren't a lot of great poets in the late eighteenth century), but still, his neglect is a shame: unlike some forgotten names, Cowper actually seems rather well suited to modern sensibilities. He wrote in a very natural, conversational register, which disguised his perfect mastery of classical forms; and the things that animated him – animal rights, mental health, opposition to hunting and slavery – were rare at the time but are now mainstream, making him feel remarkably pioneering.
Brought up to be a lawyer, he had a kind of breakdown while preparing to take the bar, and made the first of what would be many attempts at suicide. Committed to St Albans asylum, he had a religious epiphany and became a convert to Evangelicalism, moving to rural Buckinghamshire and living more or less in seclusion with a widowed friend called Mary Unwin, who was a lot older than him and perhaps a kind of mother-surrogate (his own mother had died when he was six). Despite recurring bouts of depression and existential terror, he was fairly happy there, and later said that one of the aims of his poetry was ‘to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure, as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue’.
His own overtly religious poetry is still sung as hymns today, and some lines have passed into common language (‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform’). He also wrote a lot of what we'd now call light verse – comic lyrics and mock-heroic poems. But he's most successful, I think, and most influential, when he's in a more thoughtful or serious mode. He writes really well about his own struggles with depression and insanity, capturing his religious terror in some striking imagery:
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.
His longest and best work, The Task, covers his mental distress, conversion to Evangelicalism, and his thoughts on many of the hot topics of the day. Written in blank verse, it's somewhat Miltonic, except that the language is much simpler and clearer. It was plainly a huge influence on Wordsworth's The Prelude, and more generally on the language of the early Romantics. Cowper writes with the lovely sense of talking naturally on paper; his lines have a conversational rhythm which is very easy to follow.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the nat'ral bond
Of brotherhood is sever'd as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour'd like his own; and, having pow'r
T' enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interpos'd
Make enemies of nations, who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one….
His own search for companionship was sometimes difficult. He never married, and indeed backed out of two potential engagements; perhaps he preferred men, but there were some cloaked suggestions after he died that he had had a genital malformation, or perhaps some kind of intersex condition (in his posthumously published memoir, he refers to himself as a ‘barren fig-tree’). Some male critics talked of his work in coded references to his ‘sensibility’ or (less coded) his ‘effeminacy’. Female readers, however, loved him. Charlotte Smith dedicated one of her long poems to him, and filled her novels with Cowper references; so did Jane Austen (indeed many Copwer readers nowadays seem to come to him from Austen). He was basically a rare male version of the ‘poet of sensibility’.
Much like the painter Henry Fuseli (who was linked to him on several projects, though they apparently never met), Cowper maybe suffers from being so transitional, tending to get described by critics as either a late, degraded Neo-Classicist or an unformed ‘pre-Romantic’. This is unfair. When he's good, he's really very good indeed, and his letters are among the most chatty and revealing of the age. It's just a shame his life story trended so strongly downwards: by his final years, he was gripped by existential horror again, writing to absent friends about the sheer pain of having been born:
I existed by a decree from which there was no appeal, and on terms the most tremendous, because unknown to, and even unsuspected by me; difficult to be complied with had they been foreknown, and unforeknown, impracticable.
It's such a long way from the amiable banter of his early correspondence. But Cowper knew that all things were finite, and indeed captured the idea better than most:
All has its date below; the fatal hour
Was register'd in heav'n ere time began.
We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works
Die too: the deep foundations that we lay,
Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains.
We build with what we deem eternal rock:
A distant age asks where the fabric stood;
And in the dust, sifted and search'd in vain,
The undiscoverable secret sleeps.
But don't let his secret sleep before it needs to – do yourself a favour, and check him out.
March 15, 2020
I’m learning to love poetry, having recently been won round to Johns Clare and Keats but I was nervous about reading, not a few poems at a time, but a whole book. What was especially nerve-wracking was the fact that I had not heard of William Cowper, to the extent I didn’t even know how to pronounce his name (‘Cooper’).
At the beginning of this selection there is an introduction that consists of a short biography of the writer and short appreciation of his qualities as a poet and a general understanding of where he fits in with other poets. This was also off-putting, Cowper was a rather fragile person who lived a life of anxiety and depression, which could lead to a heavy body of poetry. Even worse was the part about his style which emphasised that he remained in the formal constraints of eighteenth century poetry - tight, formal, emotionally tight poetry of a depressive nature - this all sounded quite awful.
And it wasn’t.
Most of the poems are utterly charming. The Diverting History of John Gilpin is a nonsensical galloping bit of fun about a man being galloped about by a powerful horse. There’s a brilliant poem about a snail, translated from a Latin original, in which the little bogey-like animal is transformed into this lovely quirky little chap.
Cowper’s longest poem was The Task, which was loved by Jane Austen (who could quote big chunks of it) and inspired sections of the Lyrical Ballads. The initial task was to write about a sofa, but the poem becomes a description of a walk in the winter, then a description of the winter evening, then night and a last part about the coming of the spring.
One of most notable things is Cowper’s ability to simply watch and listen. The winter walk describes the quiet of winter as well as how it looks. There is the slip of wet grass and the snap of dry twigs. The evening part has him staring into his fire, taking time to simply be and watch the shapes and little wisps of smoke. His description of snow falling had me remembering times in our life when we had been captivated by that same silent magic.
“To-morrow brings a change, a total change,
Which even now, though silently performed
And slowly, and by most unfelt, the face
Of universal nature undergoes.
Fast falls a fleecy shower; the downy flakes,
Descending and with never-ceasing lapse
Softly alighting upon all below,
Assimilate all objects. Earth receives
Gladly the thickening mantle, and the green
And tender blade, that feared the chilling blast,
Escapes unhurt beneath so warm a veil.”
Yardley Oak was a poem which didn’t quite work bu had some great ideas. The poem is about the enormous lifespan of an ancient oak, revelling in the amazement of all it might have seen and been a part of. The register of the poem is thus antique, riddled with latinate words and old fashioned conjugations. Unfortunately it renders the poem rather ridiculous and brings forward lines like, “Fostering propitious, thou becam’st a twig.”
Better were his poems that read like a diary, describing his feelings towards his pet hares, the other animals about him and his safety in his small environment.
When he did write about his depressive episodes, he could be very moving (if a little self-pitying). In his poem, Lines written in a period of insanity, he ends the poem with a description of his damnation, not to Hell put into; “a fleshly tomb” where he is “buried above ground.”
The poem, The Castaway, dealt not with a Castaway but with a man who had been washed off his ship, only to be lost in the waves. He describes the power of the wave, the panic of being knocked from the ship, the shouting from the men and their absolute powerlessness as they are driven further away from their shipmate who is swimming strongly but with little use. Finally, it shows how strongly he identified with the drowning man, describing himself as; ‘beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.”
However, the overall experience of reading Cowper was not one of depression but a simple and unaffected pleasure, blessed with a capacity for joy built on observation and a simple connection with the world around him that channeled into his poetry. I was very glad to make his acquaintance.
Read
September 6, 2015To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all
Together.
Within that house secure he hides,
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
Of weather.
Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting power is such,
He shrinks into his house, with much
Displeasure.
Where’er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chattels none,
Well satisfied to be his own
Whole treasure.
Thus, hermit-like, his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meets one, only feeds
The faster.
Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combin’d)
If, finding it, he fails to find
Its master
February 7, 2024
Everything that the unlettered think C19th poetry is like – full of daft made-up sounding words, stiff and artificial in its expression, commonplace and melodramatic in its ideas – Cowper really is. His archaic language alone, with its ‘thou know’st’s and ‘thou may’st’s, and all its unnecessary apostrophes to omit vowels that are not pronounced anyway (‘discern’d’) is hugely off-putting, although better poets got away with similar things. But he is also in constant danger of tipping over into McGonagallish ludicrousness:
Ye fearful saints fresh courage take
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with Mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head
An oak tree is described as ‘with excoriate forks deform’ [no, not 'deformed'!]; a stable as ‘yielding a stercoraceous heap’ (whatever the flip that means). You don’t have to look hard for these instances, they're almost the first things I see as I leaf through the book. It’s little credit to his era, or to the art of poetry, that Cowper was highly regarded in his time; he contributed to the language phrases like ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and ‘monarch of all I survey’ – although to be fair both of those tend to be used archly, often in old sitcoms.
Maybe Cowper genuinely felt as a poet. If so I pity him, but it’s not enough to have feelings: you also need the intelligence to frame them in words, and the artistry to make them pleasing as verse. And it’s because stuff like this is offered in the name of poetry that people feel they don’t get it, or that it’s not for them, or simply that it’s the preserve of arty wankers - or alternatively, in reaction against it, that any old rubbish qualifies as poetry if it is only sententious enough.
Ye fearful saints fresh courage take
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with Mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head
An oak tree is described as ‘with excoriate forks deform’ [no, not 'deformed'!]; a stable as ‘yielding a stercoraceous heap’ (whatever the flip that means). You don’t have to look hard for these instances, they're almost the first things I see as I leaf through the book. It’s little credit to his era, or to the art of poetry, that Cowper was highly regarded in his time; he contributed to the language phrases like ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and ‘monarch of all I survey’ – although to be fair both of those tend to be used archly, often in old sitcoms.
Maybe Cowper genuinely felt as a poet. If so I pity him, but it’s not enough to have feelings: you also need the intelligence to frame them in words, and the artistry to make them pleasing as verse. And it’s because stuff like this is offered in the name of poetry that people feel they don’t get it, or that it’s not for them, or simply that it’s the preserve of arty wankers - or alternatively, in reaction against it, that any old rubbish qualifies as poetry if it is only sententious enough.
October 11, 2020
It is strange to realise that Cowper very much overlapped with all the Romantic poets. Indeed Southey, possibly the least inspired of them, published a Life & Collected Works of Cowper. He exhibits the faintest elements of ideas and traits which were to blossom in Wordsworth, the approach to the personal, the importance of the unimportant things in life, the baring of the soul and a sense of religion. But Cowper is very cosy, comfortable. He never surprises or inspires. The regularity of his metres reflects the regularity of his ideas. But a very easy read because of that of course.
Want to read
November 4, 2022one of jane austen’s favorite poets
May 7, 2012
Reading Cowper for the first time, I was struck with how absolutely readable his poems are, even though they were written over 200 years ago. For the most part, his language does not show its age, and could be written by a popular poet or songwriter even today. Some lines are absolutely perfect, such as in "Retirement" when he says, "The good we never miss we rarely prize."
Walking with God from his Olney Hymns is a pure master work, as well as "To the Nightingale" and "Verses Supposed to be Written...Juan Fernandez." This is a short volume, and unassuming. Take it seriously - it is fantastic.
Walking with God from his Olney Hymns is a pure master work, as well as "To the Nightingale" and "Verses Supposed to be Written...Juan Fernandez." This is a short volume, and unassuming. Take it seriously - it is fantastic.
May 7, 2012
Full of sentiment, free of sentimentality. Rightly rescued from the obscurity of his contemporaries.
February 23, 2018
Pastoral poetry at its finest.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews