SOURCE: O'Brien, Karen. “‘Still at Home’: Cowper's Domestic Empires.” In Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, edited by Thomas Woodman, pp. 134-47. London: Macmillan, 1998.

[In the following essay, O'Brien probes Cowper's juxtaposition of private and public concerns, and his moral focus on the still, small, quiet and humble in The Task.]

Questions of William Cowper's sense of empire are like those of his ‘pre-romanticism’: more interesting in the details. The British Empire raises difficulties of style and poetic mode of address in Cowper's poetry which force him to a final reckoning with the traditions of eighteenth-century poetry, if not, ultimately, to the invention of anything we would conventionally describe as ‘romanticism’ or ‘romantic ideology’. Although he was later sentimentalized by the Victorians as the voice of hearth and heart, Cowper displayed in his poetry a robust interest in the politics of imperial expansion. For Cowper, as less obtrusively for Wordsworth and Coleridge, the empire defined the outer limits for a poetic sensibility centred in but not enclosed by the rural home. In particular, Cowper's major achievement, his georgic-descriptive poem The Task (1785), is immersed in the turbulent imperial events of the early 1780s. Written from a vantage point in the countryside, the poem takes as its earthly horizon British imperial territories past and future; these range from the newly discovered Pacific islands to India (whose administration by the East India Company was, at the time of writing, the occasion of scandal and constitutional crisis) and to North America, only two years before ignominiously ceded to the rebellious American colonists. Critics have drawn up the balance sheet of Cowper's imperial opinions—for the retaining, by force if necessary, of the American colonies, against slavery, for and then decisively against British rule in India, and so on—although most have resisted the temptation to rummage through his poems for imperialist prejudices or congratulate them for their bouts of anti-colonialism.¹ Cowper was an intelligent but straightforward political thinker whose opinions had the consistency of the evangelical Protestantism against which he measured them, and his specifically political ideas about empire need no further elucidation here.² Of more interest is the special quality of Cowper's imperial awareness which permeates and modifies his sense of what it means to be ‘still at home’ in the country, just as, in turn, the homely stillness at the centre of The Task resists the generic pressure of georgic towards an easy confluence of rural, national and imperial vistas.³

For the poem begins with the words ‘I sing the Sofa’—with, in other words, an eastern and exotic word and a mock-classical formula awkwardly at home in an English country setting. Sofas, Cowper reveals a few lines later, were originally made of Indian cane, and, like most private persons of his day, his main point of contact with the empire was, indeed, through the consumption of furniture, tea and sugar (I: 39). Cowper's mock-epic history of sofas collapses abruptly into a long prelude on his love of rural life, and his new task becomes how to establish a domestic position of poetic address which can incorporate, without appearing diminished by, a responsible sense of the wider life of politics and empires. In many of the earlier eighteenth-century descriptive poems which influenced Cowper's work, such as John Philips's Cyder, Thomson's Seasons, Dyer's The Fleece or Jago's Edge Hill, the mode of rural poetic address to an expanding nation is drawn from the traditional resources of georgic; the description of the aesthetic and productive qualities of the British landscape is itself an act of pietas to the sources of the nation's metropolitan and imperial greatness. From the prospect vantage points, adopted in these poems at moments of emotional elevation, the poets see, with an eye which coordinates rural, national and providential visions, the moral enlargement of the countryside in the imperial sphere. Thomson's Seasons, in particular, is, obsessively, a poem about boundlessness which begins with a dizzying prescription to ‘generous Britons’ to pour ‘Nature's better Blessings […] / O'er every Land, the naked Nations cloath, / And be th' exhaustless Granary of a World!’⁴The Task has none of these imperial prospects. The global sensibility of Cowper's earlier poem ‘Charity’ (1782), in which trade is eulogized as the ‘boundless plenty’ and ‘golden girdle of the globe’ bringing the world into a divine order of economic reciprocity, becomes, in The Task, the lonely gaze of Omai, the Pacific islander who once visited England and who now yearns to return.⁵ Cowper imagines Omai back at home in Tahiti on a mountain top ‘with eager eye / Exploring far and wide the wat'ry waste / For sight of ship from England’ (I: 664-6). Omai's prospect of the British Empire is doomed to disappointment since, as Cowper explains, the English have no economic interest in Pacific territories ‘inclosed', as he puts it, ‘in boundless oceans never to be pass'd’ (I: 628-9). Thomsonian boundlessness reappears here in a fable of imperial isolation. The story of Omai also appears to recapitulate Pope's striking inversion of the colonial gaze at the end of Windsor-Forest when ‘naked [Indian] youths and painted chiefs’ come to England to ‘admire / Our Speech, our Colour, and our Strange Attire!’⁶

Although deeply imbued with The Seasons, then, The Task eschews or inverts its imperial vistas, and the moral value of Cowper's landscape is not, as it is for Thomson, guaranteed by labour. Cowper describes little hard work of any kind, although a good deal of energy is inefficiently expended on the rearing of season-defying cucumbers and hot-house fruits (III: 447-623). The distinctive achievement of The Task is its disengagement of the rural home, peasant cottages, gentry piles and all from the simultaneously bucolic and mercantile vision of previous eighteenth-century georgic poems. The poem separates the pre-lapsarian idyll of the rural environment, most fully expressed in the third book, from its satirical and moralizing political voices. In the process, however, Cowper sacrifices the rich metaphorical congruities available to earlier poets of garden, nation and empire, and he concedes that the political awareness upon which he bases his praise and blame of England and its empires comes from a mediated, second-hand vision of the world. ‘They love the country', Cowper remarks with deliberate artlessness and revisionist emphasis, ‘and none else, who seek / For their own sake its silence and its shade’ (III: 320-1). This is an apparently romantic sentiment. Wordsworth, perhaps echoing this line at the close of ‘Tintern Abbey', declares that, in the presence of Dorothy, the ‘steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape / […]’ become ‘More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake!’⁷ An additional rhythmic stress loiters over the word ‘thy’ as if to emphasize that Dorothy is a more vivid companionable presence than, say, Mary Unwin, Cowper's quiet companion in The Task. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Cowper's choice of the country makes visible a process of conscious poetic disinvestment of its ‘silence and its shade’ from the public life of the town. This public life is, Cowper repeatedly tells us, the realm of ‘Custom and prejudice’ (VI: 838), and is part of the whole fabric of history and social assumption against which he erects a ‘faithful barrier not o'erleap'd', as Milton's Satan o'erleaped the walls of paradise, ‘with ease’ (III: 681). Inside the barrier, the poet has evolved day-to-day customs and rituals of his own for their own sake, merely to allow his life to ‘glide away’ agreeably (VI: 1000). Wordsworth explains that the pleasurable ‘feelings’ which a ‘good man’ takes from the countryside to the town have exerted ‘no trivial influence’ on the conduct of his life.⁸ Cowper undertakes a more risky imaginative juxtaposition between the acknowledged trivialities of country life and the mercantile and political world of the town without feeling obliged to forge a connection between them in terms of morally regenerative continuity.

These points are best illustrated by a detailed examination of the texture of Cowper's verse in relation to his inward and international concerns, and, in particular, by a passage in which he reflects directly upon his seclusion from the public domain. This passage occurs a short way into the fourth book of The Task, entitled ‘The Winter Evening', and opens with the eagerly awaited arrival of the post boy, with ‘news from all nations lumb'ring at his back’ (IV: 7). The boy is, like the poet, cheerfully indifferent to the good or bad news he brings in the letters and papers. Even so, the poet confesses to an irrepressible, sensationalist appetite for any news of the empire which might emerge from the boy's leather sack:

                                                                                                              who can say
What are its tidings? have our troops awak'd?
Or do they still, as if with opium drugg'd
Snore to the murmurs of th'Atlantic wave?
Is India free? and does she wear her plum'd
And Jewell'd turban with a smile of peace,
Or do we grind her still? the grand debate,
The popular harangue, the tart reply,
The logic and the wisdom and the wit
And the loud laugh—I long to know them all:
I burn to set th'imprison'd wranglers free,
And give them voice and utt'rance once again.

(IV: 24-35)

All Cowper's attitudes to empire, elsewhere articulated in this poem, in the 1782 volume of poems and in the letters, are here condensed. The snoring British troops are those defeated some years before in America who, in Cowper's opinion, had lacked the courage and the political support to keep the 13 British colonies out of the incapable hands of the Americans.⁹ We are also reminded of Pope's attack on Walpole's failure to protect British imperial interests in the Americas, and the ‘Chiefless Armies’ who ‘dozed out the Campaign’ at the end of The Dunciad.¹⁰ Indeed, Cowper was throughout the 1770s and 1780s something of a hawk on the American question, despite the fact that his political idol Chatham had, until the moment of his death, passionately urged conciliation with the colonies. Cowper attributed the loss of the colonies to a domestic failure of patriotic nerve and, after the British capitulation to peace, predicted worse to come: ‘I consider the loss of America', he wrote in 1781, ‘as the ruin of England.’¹¹ The ‘grand debate’ alludes to the tumultuous passage of Fox's India Bill in the Commons and its defeat, after royal intervention, in the Lords, and, particularly perhaps, to Burke's great speech of 1783 in favour of crown regulation of the East India Company. Cowper was consistently anti imperial on the Indian question and, after the failure of Fox's India Bill which he earnestly supported, he wrote in a letter that he ‘would abandon all territorial interest in a country to which we can have no right’.¹² Cowper was simultaneously enthralled and horrified by Burke's torrent of Ciceronian invective against both the Company and his old school friend, the Governor-General, Warren Hastings.¹³ The word ‘grind’ catches the bitter and concrete satirical style of Burke's speech, as earlier in The Task Cowper's attack on those ‘peculators of public gold', the nabobs, with their ‘overgorg'd and bloated’ purses, recalls Burke's harangue against the ‘peculating despotism’ of the Company in India, and his depiction of the young nabobs as ‘birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting’ (I: 735-7).¹⁴

This portion of ‘The Winter Evening’ combines Cowper's already familiar imperial opinions with a witty consideration of the medium of print. Print, as the first person plurals in the passage imply, constructs its own complicities and communities of readers. Reading brings guilt by association but also a pleasing sense of moral exoneration from the mimic life of a nation known only through the papers. The poet draws the sofa up to the fire, pours himself a cup of tea and starts to read. A jumble of parliamentary news, anecdotes of popular entertainers and adverts for makeup and false teeth transfers itself from the page to the poet's imagination where the city world is miniaturized like a peep show.¹⁵ Cowper is then prompted to reflect on this process of print mediation:

'Tis pleasant through the loop-holes of retreat
To peep at such a world. To see the stir
Of the great Babel and not feel the crowd.
To hear the roar she sends through all her gates
At a safe distance, where the dying sound
Falls a soft murmur on th'uninjured ear.
Thus sitting and surveying thus at ease
The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced
To some secure and more than mortal height,
That lib'rates and exempts me from them all.
It turns submitted to my view, turns round
With all its generations; I behold
The tumult and am still. The sound of war
Has lost its terrors 'ere it reaches me;
Grieves but alarms me not. I mourn the pride
And av'rice that makes man a wolf to man,
Hear the faint echo of those brazen throats
By which he speaks the language of his heart,
And sigh, but never tremble at the sound.
He travels and expatiates, as the bee
From flow'r to flow'r, so he from land to land;
The manners, customs, policy of all
Pay contribution to the store he gleans,
He sucks intelligence in ev'ry clime,
And spreads the honey of his deep research
At his return, a rich repast for me.
He travels and I too. I tread his deck,
Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes
Discover countries, with a kindred heart
Suffer his woes and share in his escapes,
While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home

(IV: 88-119)

The syntactic and lexical simplicity achieved in this transparent passage of verse is typical of those moments in The Task when Cowper relieves the winding seriality of his reflections with moments of heightened awareness. Other eighteenth-century writers of blank verse, such as Thomson, Dyer or Akenside, simulate visual prospect through an accelerated syntactic momentum which carries their imaginations forward to an enticing or terrifying horizon. Akenside, for example, dramatizes the almost physical propulsion of the man whose ‘lab'ring eye / Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey / Nilus or Ganges rowling his bright wave / Thro' mountains, plains, thro' empires black with shade, And continents of sand’.¹⁶ Cowper does admit to a surveying ‘relish of fair prospect', and confesses how his ‘eye / […] posted’ on ‘speculative height / Exults in its command', although he never speculates and his verse never transports him as far as the Nile or the Ganges (I: 141, 288-90). The survey in the above passage of The Task comes, not from the eye, but from an indirect apprehension of the great Babel outside, and brings an untroubled admission of emotional and political disengagement from the public world. It is tempting to read this passage as an ironic commentary on the poet's domestic insulation from the ‘globe and its concerns', both here and in the poem as a whole.¹⁷ However, Cowper is one step ahead of these incipient ironies, and there is, for example, a self-knowingness in the overtly imperious phrase ‘it turns submitted to my view’.

In a broader way, these ironies are contained by Cowper's moral valuation of stillness. The passage borrows some of its philosophic seriousness from the section of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura upon which it is based. The second book De Rerum opens with a meditation on the pleasures of philosophical detachment: ‘Suave […] magnum alterius spectare laborem’ (‘it is pleasant to survey the great tribulation of another man’). Lucretius imagines himself looking down (the verb is ‘despicere’) from a great philosophic eminence upon others wandering without purpose in the world. Cowper, too, knows that he is, in both figurative senses, looking down on the world (‘despiciens’). He does not say whether his claim to ‘exemption’ from the world with its wars and empires derives from a higher commitment to Christian duty or from the epicurean sufficiency of pleasure. The affirmation of special insight comes, rather, from the limpid quality of the verse itself, particularly the words, ‘I behold / The tumult and am still’. Only at moments of personal revelation and Christian self-dedication does Cowper's verse risk this kind of baldness. We are reminded of the ‘stricken deer’ passage in ‘The Garden’ when Christ removes the arrows of sin and misery from the poet's side: ‘He drew them forth, and heal'd and bade me live’ (III: 116). The same reverential parataxis is employed later in the same book to describe a man engaged in the ‘silent task’ of daily piety:

He that attends to his interior self
That has a heart, and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers, and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business.

(III: 373-7)

Such moments of extreme verbal simplicity symbolize the conjoining of Christ with the inner self. In his prose conversion narrative, Adelphi, Cowper had told how Christ spoke to the soul of his younger self in a voice which he represents as simple, still and small. During much of his suicidal depression before the conversion, Cowper claims that he heard Satan urging him with a Miltonic voice to make evil his good, but, on conviction of sin, he recalls that the Lord told him plainly, ‘Think what you are doing; consider, and live.’¹⁸ Later, when Cowper describes being reborn in Christ, he says that he heard the divine words, ‘Peace, be still’. When, in The Task, Cowper beholds the tumult and is still, he once again performs an act of verbal quietism in the evangelical faith that the moral core of the self needs no Miltonic rhetoric and no ornamental language to speak and be heard.¹⁹

The moral satires of Cowper's 1782 volume of poetry are all in couplets, and the switch in The Task to blank verse was, in part, a quest for this kind of clarity. The question of clarity in relation to the technicalities of poetry is much discussed in Cowper's letters and acquires particular urgency after his reading of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Cowper was furious with Johnson for his ruling on ‘the unfitness of the English Language for Blank Verse', indignant at his treatment of Milton, and apoplectic at his condescension to Prior.²⁰ Cowper's defence of Prior's ‘familiar style’ in a letter to William Unwin reads like an idealized description of his own:

To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshall the words of it in such an order, as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness; harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.²¹

This letter was written in 1782, and soon after, Cowper would abandon the relaxed rhymed couplets of his current work for the ‘arduous task’ of extemporary-seeming blank verse. The letter implies that, even at this stage, Cowper saw rhyme as ultimately superfluous to his style, not so much a discipline as something to be discreetly tucked into the unaffected syntactic ordering of the verse.²² Even so, as The Task progressed, he became mindful of the dangers of diffuseness entailed by this new unrhymed form of poetry. He may have remembered Johnson's alarming diagnosis of the symptoms of intellectual and moral laxity in the blank verse of Akenside (‘The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing the sense with the couplet …’).²³ Cowper's blank verse claims no enthusiastic ‘exemption’ from grammatical and moral intelligibility; even when he reaches a meditative stake ‘that lib'rates and exempts’ him from the bustle of the world, he observes a more than usually strict duty to clarity.

‘The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived', Johnson further complained of Akenside's verse, ‘attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear’.²⁴ It is amusing to note that T. S. Eliot's more measured reservations about Milton's aural style have the same flavour of Anglican disdain for the verbal indiscipline of poetic non-conformity: ‘a dislocation takes place, through the hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense of the visual and the tactile, so that the inner meaning is separated from the surface …’²⁵ Cowper, it must be said, has nothing to say on behalf of Akenside, but in his letters and annotations, he defends Milton as a poet uniquely capable of integrating aural surface and inner meaning.²⁶ He also, by a curious metonymy, later repeated in ‘The Garden’, links clarity in blank verse to moral self-discipline (III: 684-93). Here he writes to William Unwin again shortly before the publication of The Task:

Blank verse […] cannot be chargeable with much Obscurity, must rather be singularly perspicuous to be so easily comprehended. It is my labour and my principal one, to be as clear as possible. You do not mistake me when you suppose that I have a great respect for the virtue that flies temptation. It is that sort of prowess which the whole strain of Scripture calls upon us to manifest when assailed by sensual Evil.²⁷

The passage from ‘The Winter Evening’ respects the kind of linguistic clarity and moral withdrawal advocated in this letter. In many other descriptive poems of the eighteenth century, the moral benefits of survey are differently conceived. Akenside speaks of ‘exhibiting the most ingaging prospects of nature, to enlarge and harmonize the imagination, and by that means insensibly dispose the minds of men to a similar taste and habit of thinking in religion, morals and civil life’.²⁸ He is like one of the expatiators described in the ‘Winter Evening’ passage, travelling imaginatively from land to land, and, like Thomson and Dyer, correlating in his poetry an expansive sensibility, style and vision of the world. Cowper's poetry has the opposite tendency, electing to curb the range of vision and to disaggregate nature into its component details. As he explains to his interlocutor in ‘Table Talk', he sees the world with the restricted view of a humble man: ‘An ell or two of prospect we command, / But never peep beyond the thorny bound / Or oaken fence that hems the paddock round’.²⁹

In the passages of natural description in The Task, Cowper dissolves the rural sights and sounds into detail by means of a restless verse in which caesurae at unexpected points in the lines fall in behind small and varied units of syntax, and Miltonic vocabulary and elastic enjambement are carefully rationed to a few conspicuous occasions. This minute variousness in the verse is, as Cowper explained in a letter of 1786, deliberately and highly wrought: ‘I give as much variety in my measure as I can, I believe I may say as in ten syllables it is possible to give, shifting perpetually the pause and cadence.’³⁰ Cowper's chosen style of blank verse differs significantly from the forward thrust of Wordsworth's more Miltonic periods not least because it enables him to position delicately within the line the detailed and trivial things which Wordsworth prefers to absorb into a wider aural texture. The Task is, for many critics, a poem of the merely trivial, a work written, in Hazlitt's view, ‘with the finicalness of the private gentleman', and nowhere more notoriously so than in the comic georgic passages about greenhouses and cucumber growing.³¹ In the passage from ‘The Winter Evening', Cowper voluntarily indicates, with words such as ‘loop-holes', ‘peep’ and ‘peering eyes', his own awareness that a world known at second hand is a world inevitably trivialized, but accepts this with a kind of wise passiveness which he invites his newspaper-reading audience to share. Yet, in the long section of ‘The Garden’ given over to the raising of cucumbers and other greenhouse fruits, Cowper's elaborate georgic comedy and brazenly mock-Miltonic verse force us to a reckoning with the quaint inconsequence of his life of rural ease. Here, Cowper indulges in the polysyllabic vocabulary, heavy enjambement and inverted syntax which he so strenuously denies himself in plain text passages elsewhere.

Claude Rawson has found in these passages a ‘stylistic loss of nerve’. Their ‘ceaseless twitchings of mock-heroic impulse are designed to make an amiable fuss around the very absence’ of the kind of ‘decisive position’ capable of generating a genuinely mock-heroic perspective.³² However, these passages can be read in exactly the opposite way as evidence for a stylistic gaining of nerve elsewhere in The Task, and this reading is possible if we pay attention, once again, to the tradition of imperial georgic to which this poem obliquely relates. Cowper's greenhouse concentrates in miniature the exotic natural products of the world ‘warm and snug’ under a single roof (III: 568): oranges and limes, the ‘golden boast / Of Portugal and western India', peppers, geraniums and ice-plants crowd together in defiance of the natural seasons (III: 571-2). Cowper's description of these exotic items recalls those lavish tributes of fruits and spices which Baroque panegyrists of empire, such as Waller or Dryden, imagined sailing in from the British Empire towards the feet of Cromwell and Charles II. In Windsor-Forest, Pope used similar images when he prophesied that the ‘Balm shall bleed, and Amber flow, / The Coral redden, and the Ruby glow’ as part of the world's spontaneous tribute to the Thames's universal British Empire of peace.³³ In The Task, it is the poet who plays the role of petty emperor receiving his tribute of fruits and flowers, and who possesses orphic power, like that of Denham's or Pope's Thames, over the world's exotic produce:

                                                                                th'Azores send
Their jessamine, her jessamine remote
Caffraia; foreigners from many lands
They form one social shade, as if conven'd
By magic summons of th'Orphean lyre

(III: 583-7)

As well as making a witty sally against the imperial poetics of the Augustans, Cowper is poking fun at Thomson's rather solemn eulogium in ‘Summer’ to that symbol of imperial consumption, the pineapple:

                    Oft in humble Station dwells
Unboastful Worth, above fastidious Pomp.
Witness, thou best Anana, thou the Pride
Of vegetable Life, beyond what'er
The Poets imag'd in the golden Age.(34)

Thomson's epideictic is delivered with a straight face, and the exotic note sounded by ‘Anana’ leads him directly to his great prospect of the uncolonized lands of the tropics. Cowper, as we can now perhaps more clearly see, has engaged not so much in mock-Miltonics as mock-Thomsonics, by investing ordinary plants with portentous moral, national and imperial meaning.

Elsewhere in The Task, Cowper has the stylistic nerve to endow the plants, animals and people of Britain with independent, trivial life. This seems to me the opposite of romantic ideology, a withholding from metaphor of the essential components of God's creation and a conservation of their trivial rather than transcendent being. National and international concerns, and all the affairs of the world created by man, are approached in The Task by a more direct route. Cowper creates in this work a poetry of political disinvestment the better to sustain, over long passages of overt political concern, an uncontaminated, antithetical voice of social prophecy. This curiously disembodied voice, so prominent in all the books of The Task, speaks from the stillness and personal exemption which Cowper claims in ‘The Winter Evening’ passage: ‘Folly such as your's', he inveighs against the urban rich, ‘Has made […] / Our arch of empire, stedfast but for you, / A mutilated structure, soon to fall’ (I: 770-4). The ‘great Babel’ he mentions in the passage becomes elsewhere in the poem a picture of London as a ‘boundless’ and seething mercantile metropolis, and is intensified as a vision of the sinful civitas terrena from which only the global empire of the New Jerusalem in the last book can rescue mankind: ‘Eastern Java there / Kneels with the native of the farthest West, / And Aethiopia spreads abroad the hand / And worships’ (VI: 810-13). The closing pages of The Task engage in a moral revaluation of Protestant spirituality as a man's best service to his country. Cowper proclaims the social usefulness of the obscure, quiet man: as the saying goes, ‘Stillest streams / Oft water fairest meadows’ (VI: 929-30). This is, for Cowper at the end of his task, both a species of quietism and the moral axis along which to build a more just and devout Protestant nation and empire.

Notes

1. On Cowper's attitude to empire, see Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 239-40 and passim. Also Peter Faulkner, ‘William Cowper and the Poetry of Empire', Durham University Journal, 83 (1991), 165-73.

2. On Cowper's political views, see also Newey, ‘William Cowper and the Condition of England', in Literature and Nationalism, eds Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991) and Bill Hutchings, ‘William Cowper and 1789’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989), 71-93 (in fact, a general article on Cowper's politics).

3. The Task, A Poem, in Six Books, IV: 119, in The Poems of William Cowper, eds, John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (3 vols) (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980-95), II. Citations will be taken from this edition, although much important information can also be found in the edition by James Sambrook, The Task and Selected Other Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4. The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ll. 68-77. On georgic and empire, see my ‘Imperial Georgic, 1660-1789’, in The Country and the City Revisited, eds Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1998).

5. The Poems of William Cowper, I: l. 86.

6. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, eds John Butt et al. (11 vols) (London and New Haven, NH: Methuen, 1939-69), I: ll. 405-6.

7. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, eds James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1798 text, ll. 158-60.

8. Lyrical Ballads, 1798 text, ll. 31-4.

9. See The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, eds James King and Charles Ryscamp (5 vols) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979-86), I: 570.

10. Twickenham Edition, V: ll. 617-18. This allusion is not mentioned by Cowper's editors.

11. Letters, I: 555.

12. Letters, II: 235. See also ‘Expostulation’ (1782) in Poems, I: ll. 364-71.

13. Letters, IV: 72-3.

14. ‘Speech on Fox's India Bill’ (1783) in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. V, ed. Peter Marshall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 430 and 402 respectively. This speech was published as a pamphlet in 1784.

15. Baird and Ryskamp's edition traces many of Cowper's observations to his daily newspaper, The Morning Chronicle.

16. ‘The Pleasures of Imagination’ (1744 version), in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), I ll. 176-9.

17. For a somewhat different but subtle and illuminating reading of this passage, see Martin Priestman, Cowper's ‘Task’: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 112-14.

18. Adelphi: A Sketch of the Character … of the Late Rev. John Cowper (published 1802), in Letters, I: 21.

19. Letters, I: 41 (echoing Mark 4: 39). Cowper's particular interest in Catholic Quietism was revealed by the publication, in 1801, of his translation of the poems of Mme Guyon. See Poems, II.

20. Letters, I: 307; II: 10.

21. Letters, II: 10.

22. On Cowper's use of the couplet, see Wallace C. Brown, The Triumph of Form: A Study of the Later Masters of the Heroic Couplet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), pp. 132-41.

23. Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (3 vols) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), III: 417.

24. Lives of the Poets, III: 412.

25. On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1951), p. 143.

26. Letters, II: 500.

27. Letters, II: 288.

28. ‘The Pleasures of Imagination’ (1744 text), Preface, in The Poetical Works, p. 88.

29. Poems, I: ll. 581-3.

30. Letters, II: 586.

31. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, eds Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller (12 vols) (London: J. M. Dent, 1902), V: 91.

32. Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Humanities Press, 1985), p. 371.

33. Twickenham Edition, I: ll. 393-4.

34. The Seasons, II: ll. 683-7.