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 read law with a solicitor. At the age of thirty-two he was confined in a mental institution for a suicide attempt caused by mental imbalance, but was released two years later (1765) to spend the rest of his life under the care of Mary Unwin, to whom for nineteen years he owed his salvation. His mind, always inclined toward suicide and religious mania, was strongly affected by his contacts for a time with the Calvinist John Newton, who instilled in him a terror of eternal damnation.
A gentle and instinctive poet, an admirer of Milton whose foreign-language poems he translated, COWPER expressed in his delicate and artless verses his love for nature, for all living beings, and for 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 were his satirical and moralizing poems, as well as his austere and monotonous translation of Homer (1791), written as a protest against Pope’s translation. In his last work, The Castaway, the Calvinist preoccupation with damnation resurfaces.