The Critical Principles of William Cowper
After Ben Jonson, Cowper is the most neglected of our poets. It was Hayley's Life and Letters that set the fashion; ever since, no poet has been surrendered so frequently, and with so little compunction, to the tender mercies of the biographer. Such criticism as there is has labelled Cowper 'Romantic precursor'; and it seems that we read his poems only to discover in them things that have been done better since, by Wordsworth or some other. No one will deny that the Wordsworthian and other potentialities are there, but they are surely not the most important things in Cowper's poetry. His work is far more the consummation of one tradition than the prelude to another. 'What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when you have detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed, being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest he hit what the rest had been seeking.'1 He was very consciously and deliberately a neo-classical poet.
He was, if anything, a defiant rearguard. Already, by the time he wrote, the neo-classical austerity was rare, and the taste was all for florid diction, the sublime, a syrupy metrical smoothness, and melting sensibility. His critical conservatism is apparent enough in the poems that are not read, such as 'Truth', 'Table-talk' and 'Retirement'. It is also apparent in the letters, along with the famous (and genuine) charm; but criticism in the letters is sparse and scattered, and it is only when a number of random judgements are put together, that one sees the consistency of Cowper's conservatism:
For a first exhibit, we may take the lines on Johnson:
____________________Here Johnson lies — a sage by all allow'd,
Whom to have bred may well make England proud;
Whose prose was eloquence, by wisdom taught,
The graceful vehicle of virtuous thought;
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