William Cowper

This book re-examines the literary significance of poet and translator William Cowper (1731-1800). Too often, Cowper is pigeonholed as an eccentric, a hopeless depressive, or even as a religious lunatic. Often regarded as an 'early' Romantic, Cowper is reconsidered in this book in light of a rich eighteenth-century political and religious culture. Rather than read him as an old-fashioned Calvinist stranded in an increasingly secularized society, Cowper can be read as someone who well understood the increasingly imprecise and emotionalist quality of eighteenth-century religious discourse and who expressed this dominant tendency with uncanny insight.