Word: cowper
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...William Cowper's kindly beckoning, the readers of two centuries have lulled away many a peaceful evening-cheered, but never inebriated-at the mild brew of his poetry. Cowper (rhymes with hooper) is remembered fondly as a plump old country gentleman in a billowy cap; apt to giggle, but otherwise of a most pleasing conversation; delighted with his bed of pinks, devoted to his hares; the least pretentious and the most lovable of England's 18th Century poets...
Unhappily, the cheery peace of this literary sampler is broken by a scarlet thread that runs wild through it all. William Cowper was a madman. He spent every moment of his last 25 years under the delusion that God hated him personally. Worse yet, Cowper's God was irrevocably determined to betray him at every turn in this life, and to torture him eternally in the next. Under this ghastly sentence, Cowper wretchedly took up, as he said, "the arduous task of being merry by force." He found temporary oblivion in lighthearted verse and in thousands of eloquent, cheerful...
Mark Van Doren's excellent selection of Cowper's letters, pieced out with biographical sections, tells the heartbreaking story of this gentle, tormented genius...
Apocalyptic Visions. William Cowper was only six when his mother, a descendant of the great John Donne, died of a fever. Timid little William never got over the shock of her death. Next year he took another severe shock when he was thrown to the young lions of an English boarding school. In sporting tradition, stronger boys mauled the weakling thoroughly, and with special zest because of an "intimate deformity" he is said to have had. William apparently made his "adjustment" by repressing his fear and shame and hatred. At any rate, when he was 21, and a law student...
Eleven years later, in 1763, while preparing for civil service exams (and perhaps despairing over the end of his first and last romance), Cowper went out of his mind again. This time, convinced that God had damned him "below Judas," he tried three times to kill himself. Two years later, with his obsession relieved but not gone, he banished himself for life to the country. For the next 35 years, at a succession of small houses in the country north of London, he lived in semi-seclusion, an "odd scrambling fellow" in a bright blue coat who pottered amiably about...