Cowper, William

COWPER, WILLIAM. - English poet, b. at Great Berkhamstead in 1731, d. at East Dereham in 1800. He studied at Westminster School (1741) and, in 1750, did legal training with a lawyer. Committed to a sanatorium at the age of thirty-two for a suicide attempt caused by mental imbalance, he left it two years later (1765) to live the rest of his life under the care of Mary Unwin, to whom the salvation of C. is owed for 19 years. His mind, always inclined to suicide and religious mania, was strongly affected by the contacts he had for a certain time with the Calvinist John Newton, who aroused in him the terror of eternal damnation.

A gentle and instinctive poet, an admirer of Milton whose poems written in foreign languages he translated, C. expresses in his delicate verses, free of artifice, the love of nature, of all living beings and the small things of daily life. To this genre belong The Task (1785), in six books, and The diverting history of John Gilpin. Less successful are the satirical and moralizing short poems, as also the austere and monotonous translation of Homer (1791) written as a protest against Pope's translation. In his last work, The Castanboy, the Calvinist nightmare of damnation makes itself felt again.

Amata Martorelli