Journal Article

William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society

Rounce, Adam

2006

Overview

Like the castaway of his most famous poem, Cowper was indeed obsessed with what he had convinced himself was his damnation; the critical task seemed to be to repeat the reasons behind this bizarre and disturbing state of affairs, and to speculate on its ultimate source (a somewhat futile pursuit, given the Deity's lack of response to literary criticism). Modern accounts by Vincent Newey, Martin Priestman, and William Hutchings (amongst others) have changed the terms of the debate considerably, moving away from the restrictive and insoluble problems ofwhether Cowper's faith was ameliorating or destructive, and instead representing a figure with far more intellectual agency and influence than the benighted and perpetually melancholy Cowper of old. Cowper, for Brunström, resists closure because his writing continually moves between concepts, genres, and ideas, without settling: \"The most perceptive criticisms of Cowper all recognise oscillation rather than synthesis as his most characteristic maneuver,\" and thus \"Cowper is not to be explained in terms of'values,' but rather in terms of tense, symbiotic relations between values\" (p. 20). [...]the fecundity of faith allowed him to reimagine the prospects and landscapes so central to his work, but only within the strictly demarcated borders and limits that he had drawn; beyond, natural images were distorted into all-tooaccurate expressions of his guilt, and sense of divine power, until domesticated hills resembled awful mountains.

• Publisher: AMS Press Inc
• Subject: British & Irish literature / Cowper, William (1731-1800) / Irish literature / Religion / Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)