The Letters of William Cowper by William Cowper
"The Letters of William Cowper" offers a unique glimpse into the life and mind of the 18th-century poet William Cowper, known for his poignant poetry and deep emotional struggles. While his poetry conveys a sense of cheerfulness and wit, his letters reveal a more complex individual grappling with severe mental health issues, including multiple episodes of insanity and despair. Cowper's correspondence, primarily written during his long residence in the quiet village of Olney, reflects both the mundane details of daily life and profound reflections on his inner turmoil.
His letters showcase his close relationships with friends, particularly the Reverend John Newton and his cousin Lady Hesketh, while also addressing broader social issues, such as the American Revolution and the plight of the poor in England amidst industrial changes. Despite his struggles, Cowper found solace in poetry, using it as a means to combat his despair and connect with the world. The letters serve as a testament to his enduring spirit, offering insights into both his humorous observations and the darker aspects of his psyche, ultimately painting a portrait of a man who was both a beloved poet and a deeply troubled soul.
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The Letters of William Cowper by William Cowper
First published: 1809
Critical Evaluation:
If we knew nothing of William Cowper except his poetry, we should be likely to picture him as a cheerful, witty, affable, and broadly humane man whose worst troubles faded before the pleasures he so abundantly found in life. Many of these qualities also appear in the man who emerges from a reading of the LETTERS; but beside the affability, the wit, the humanity, stands a person four times pushed beyond reason into insanity, more or less constantly in unmitigated despair, convinced that a vengeful God hated him and had ordained for him the eternal torments of hell.
Externally, Cowper’s life was placid and secluded, partly because his temperament could not support the competitiveness and agitation of an urban society whose pressures caused three of his derangements, partly because he found peace and consolation in the rural surroundings and quiet neighbors of Olney, the village in which he spent nearly thirty years of his adult life, and from which he wrote the largest proportion of letters which have been preserved.
Born in 1731, Cowper was apprenticed to the study of law at the age of seventeen at his father’s wish. Early letters and later reminiscences indicate that the young man put more energy into hunting, dancing, and writing literary essays for a group called The Nonsense Club than in any serious study of law. His awareness of the impracticability of a law career for himself probably caused his first mental upset in 1752. Convalescing in Southampton at the home of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, William fell in love with his cousin Theodora. Her father forbade the marriage, and although her sister Harriet was one of Cowper’s dearest friends all his life, he never saw nor spoke of Theodora again, and neither ever married.
The second period of insanity, in 1764, was caused by the pressures and worries about an impending examination for the office of Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Three attempts at suicide and a complete breakdown sent Cowper away from London forever. A year and a half in an asylum cured him, after which he became a boarder with the family of the Reverend Morley Unwin, who became his closest friends. When the minister died in 1767, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin whom he regarded, he said, almost as a mother moved to Olney and began the life so vividly represented in his letters written from there.
Cowper’s letters are familiar, sprightly, and cheerful, for he seldom indulged in communication of his despair. He considered his correspondence nothing but written conversation, certainly no more worthy of being called literature than the casual chat of acquaintances. The charm of the letters lies in this casualness. He frequently points out to his correspondents that he has really nothing to say; but after all, if the two of them were together in a parlor they would hardly sit in silence; therefore he will talk about whatever comes into his head. This habit of descanting on whatever rose to the surface of his mind provides us with informal descriptions of the life and occurrences about Olney: the furnishings of his “boudoir” (the little summerhouse in which he habitually did his writing), the perils of his pet hares, the cleverness of his spaniel Beau, the current condition of his garden, the discovery and killing of a viper in the barn, his favorite walks, the conversations of his neighbors. Some of these incidents he turned into poems, and it is hard to say whether the prose or verse versions are more charming.
The most important of his correspondents for the period 1769-1785 were the Reverend William Unwin, son of Morley Unwin, and the Reverend John Newton, an evangelical minister very influential in Cowper’s life, who collaborated with him in writing the well-known OLNEY HYMNS. During this time, Cowper suffered his third derangement, brought about by the pressure of friends to get him to marry Mrs. Unwin. In his letters to Newton, Cowper’s deepening despair can be seen; he lost his evangelical hopes and took on the sternest Calvinistic determination that he was doomed. He believed he heard the voice of God saying to him, “Actum est de te; periisti” (It is finished with thee; thou hast perished).
At the same time, he was writing some of his most delightful poetry, notably “John Gilpin’s Ride” and “The Task.” The publication of “The Task” in 1785 brought him a renewal of friendship and correspondence with his cousin Harriet, now Lady Hesketh. Her friendship was an unfailing source of joy for Cowper, and his letters to her contain the warmest affection and devotion.
The casual incidents of daily life were not the only subjects in Cowper’s letters. Though he regarded politics with an attitude rather of patience than of curiosity, he kept well-informed about current events. He expressed opinions that the revolution in the American colonies was wrong because it went far beyond a struggle for lawful liberty, created a dangerous ferment in Europe, and might actually be the destruction of England. When the slave trade in England became an issue, Cowper took a serious interest in that, too; he was considerably upset when it was rumored that he favored slavery, and he took pains to express his opposition, even writing a few satirical poems against it. Similarly, the problems raised by the incipient industrialization of England took on importance for him as he saw around him the poverty and misery of the lacemakers in Olney. Several of his letters contain indignant and compassionate comments on their fate, and when a candle tax that would fall harshly on them was imposed, Cowper argued vehemently against it.
But underneath both his everyday activities and his intellectual preoccupations, Cowper had a pervasive gloom and melancholy. He speaks in his letters of being always uneasy, inactivity making him dejected, work making him weary. He made continuing efforts to conceal his despair whenever he was in company, and to affect cheerfulness in writing. In the letters to Lady Hesketh particularly we can see his determination to minimize his unhappiness lest she worry about him. He frequently reassures her that there are long intervals between his fits of depression in which he is cheerful, even joyful, in spirits.
Cowper accounts for his becoming a poet as a defense against these blue devils of despair. The manual employments, such as carpentry and gardening that he tried at first could not keep his mind engaged, while writing verse absorbed it entirely and took him out of himself. Once started, poetry became increasingly important to him, and he was quite sensitive to criticism of his work. He writes to Lady Hesketh that, having commenced an author, he is “abundantly desirous” of succeeding as such; and he realizes that though ambition and diffidence compete for possession of his mind, the idea of gaining some distinction from his poetry was always an enticing one.
For his poetry to be appreciated gave Cowper much joy. In a letter to William Unwin in 1782, he tells how pleased he was that his tale of John Gilpin was making the whole world laugh. Innocent merriment, he observes, is so scarce in the world that it is a worthy thing for poetry to produce. But for himself, that merriment is forced on him by the underlying despair, and he compares himself to a sailor on a tempest-wracked ship employing himself in fiddling and dancing. Four years later he writes to Lady Hesketh that the poet who can make the world lively has a noble occupation; sermons, he says, leave the world as fast asleep as ever, but verse he compares to a fiddle that sets the whole universe in motion.
Besides the light and humorous verse that was so successful, Cowper undertook a translation of Homer, published in 1791, which he regarded quite seriously, and over which he labored painstakingly. Allusions to it and its critical reception are numerous in his letters. Frequent also are comments on the edition of Milton that Cowper was to bring out, but which he had not completed by his death in 1800.
The last decade of his life was a period of ever-increasing anguish for Cowper. He had moved with Mrs. Unwin from Olney to Weston village in 1786. The following year marked his fourth period of insanity. Mrs. Unwin suffered a stroke in 1791, followed by a second, from which she never fully recovered. Cowper nursed her until her death in 1796. During this period of his life he wrote frequent letters to Samuel Teedon, a schoolmaster at Olney. These letters contain an extensive description of the encroachment of Cowper’s total despair. Haunted by horrible dreams, he describes one of 1793 in which he seemed to be leaving his home for the last time on the eve of his “execution”; he wished to carry away an iron door hasp as a keepsake, but realized that the fires into which he would be thrown would only fuse the metal and increase his agony.
He describes the progression of his mental state from terror to wrath to rebellion to guilt and back to terror as inescapable as the doom he was certain God’s contempt and abhorrence had prepared for him. He repeatedly heard voices reviling him, forbidding him to pray, warning him that God would promise him redemption but would certainly damn him, offering sarcastic and ironic comfort and reassurance. These terrors, etched as if by acid into Cowper’s soul, are related so vividly in his letters to Teedon that the reader grasps the extremity of Cowper’s despair. The darkness grew deeper as his life came to an end, and found its expression as well in his letters as in the awesome last verse of his final poem, “The Castaway”:
No voice divine the storm allay’d,