Another figure from the Graveyard School, Cowper (pronounced "cooper") was a hymn writer and poet, a lawyer who abandoned the profession, and a sufferer from "melancholia" (depression), as was fellow boneyardist William Collins. Cowper also suffered from bouts of some more disturbing mental disequilibrium, associated in his mind with religious conviction and a deeply troubling sense of his own damnation. He is best known for his hymns, his translations from Latin and Greek (including The Odyssey), and for the long poem The Task (1785), well-known in its day, passages of which evoke the melancholy (found also in some odes and other poems) which bring him within the purview of the graveyarders, though he's not quite as charnel in his imagery as, say, Robert Blair or Edward Young, his companions in boneyard verse...
Sites:
The Life of William Cowper
From Complete Poetical Works. (38K) [Christian Classics Ethereal Library]
Brief biographical note
Focuses on Cowper as a writer of "natural history" in the (pre-)Romantic period. [Ashton Nichols, Dickinson College]
Brief biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia.com]
Biographical note
[Hymnuts]
Biographical note
Includes an image of Cowper and links to etexts of a number of his hymns. [CyberHymnal]
Biographical essay
[Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney, England]
Brief biographical note
[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]
"Drawn by Romney - Engd by A. H. Ritchie"
Frontispiece to The Life and Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems
Edited by the Rev. T. S. Grimshawe. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856
Frontispiece to The Life and Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems
Edited by the Rev. T. S. Grimshawe. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856
"...cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
In still-repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and e’en the boding owl
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me."
-from The Task
In still-repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and e’en the boding owl
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me."
-from The Task