Word: cowper
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...SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM COWPER (306 pp.)-Edited by Mark Van Doren-Farrar, Straus & Young...
...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...
RABELAIS (424 pp.)-John Cowper Powys-Philosophical...
...studies of Rabelais, published almost simultaneously, come as a periodic reminder of a writer who was surpassed in his age only by Shakespeare and Cervantes. Rabelais, by ancient (78) English Novelist-Essayist John Cowper Powys, enfolds the jolly old cleric in a loose shirt of verbiage that he would surely have found too hairy for comfort; The Laughing Philosopher, by M. P. Willcocks, sometimes muffles the Rabelaisian laughter in a modesty he certainly never felt. Yet both books bring back a strong, winey breath of the most exuberant of writers from Aristophanes to Balzac; a man who drank life...