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, served a legal apprenticeship with a lawyer. Committed to a sanatorium at the age of thirty-two after 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 C. owed his salvation for nineteen years. His mind, always inclined to suicide and religious mania, was deeply affected by his contacts, for a 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 and artless verses his love of nature, of all living beings, and of the small things of everyday life. Belonging to this genre are The Task (1785), in six books, and The diverting history of John Gilpin. Less successful are his satirical and moralizing poems, as is his 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 once more.