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Biography and Characterization: William Cowper (1731-1800). David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays

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Biography and Characterization: William Cowper (1731-1800). David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record David J. Brewer, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Essays.  1900. Biography and Characterization:
William Cowper (1731–1800) COWPER’S essays in the Connoisseur, written just after he had completed his studies in the Temple and had been called to the Bar, are among the sprightliest of his writings. They have the same liveliness which so surprised the friends of this saddest of English poets when it appeared in “John Gilpin.” As a poet, Cowper delivered England from what had become the intolerable singsong of the mechanical imitators of Pope. He prepared the way for Wordsworth who went so far to the other extreme, that while his best verse is as good as the best in the language, his worst is not even good prose. Cowper represents the mean between the fixed and virtually invariable rhythms of the pupils of Pope and the lack of rhythm into which Wordsworth sometimes degenerates.

1   The history of Cowper’s attempts to do his work as a poet is painful in the extreme. He had the delicate nerves which belong to genius and are the necessary instrument of its expression. Sent, when only six years old, to a school where “fagging” was a part of the educational system, he was most brutally treated by an older boy, and he was so disordered by the outrages to which he was subjected that he began soon afterwards to develop the habitual melancholy which oppressed him during his whole life and from time to time became actual insanity. He was so sensitive that the thought of appearing before the House of Lords to be examined for an appointment drove him to an attempt at suicide. His best poems, including some of the most beautiful hymns in existence, are a result of his attempt to get the mastery of this fatal weakness, but when he died April 25th, 1800, after a blameless career of the highest usefulness, it was under the black shadow of the disease which had made his whole life a crucifixion.

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