Word: cowper
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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...
Deeps Unvisited. Sometimes the infinite prospect of God's "desertion" was too much for even Cowper's "passive valor." "I now see a long winter before me," he wrote bleakly in September 1783, "and am to get through it as I can. I know the ground before I tread upon it; it is hollow, it is agitated, it suffers shocks in every direction; it is like the soil of Calabria, all whirlpool and undulation; but I must reel through it-at least if I be not swallowed...
...winter of 1786-87, Cowper was utterly swallowed up by the way. After each attack he was left with less strength to support his despair. Yet somehow, in the decade 1780-90 Cowper managed to produce his finest poems (John Gilpin, The Task) and some of his most winsome letters. After 1790, however, the doomed man felt himself "plunged in deeps, unvisited, I am convinced, by any human soul but mine...