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Cowper, William

Selected Poems, [23] 61; The Centenary Letters, [53] 29

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20090901125124 A. F. Harrold, William Cowper - Slightly Foxed Issue 23

Just Getting on with It

A. F. Harrold on William Cowper, Selected Poems

I remember hearing Leonard Cohen being interviewed some years ago, and he said, when asked whether he minded being referred to as a ‘minor poet’, that no he didn’t mind at all, in fact he had spent many delightful hours in the company of minor poets, such as Herrick. My ears pricked up when I heard that. For some reason I’d never imagined Cohen sitting down and reading seventeenth-century English clergymen, but of course I was wrong.
20170601110902 Daniel Macklin, Hedges - Alexandra Harris on William Cowper

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters

For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson, though people felt more intimately connected with Cowper than they were ever likely to feel with Milton. His long poem The Task (1785) seemed to articulate all the longed-for goodness of familiar, homely things; it was a tribute to ‘Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall!’ Yet here, and in hundreds of the letters that began to be published from 1804 onwards, things of joy were surrounded by gulfs of loss and desolation.

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