Selected Poems (Fyfield Books) (Paperback)

Cowper had a great love of Milton's poems; but arguably there is no English poet who has written poems less like Milton's. What are perhaps Cowper's best poems -- certainly the most enjoyable -- are easy to read, and make you want to use Eighteenth-century terms of approval like "easy". At his best his poetry manages to be dignified, humorous and often immensely full of pity for the miseries humans put themselves through, or are put through. One of his best known poems is a dramatic monologue "supposed to be spoken by" Alexander Selkirk (the original Robinson Crusoe: Cowper, unlike Defoe, is keen to label his reconstruction as fictional). The poem begins, with extreme poignency, "I am monarch of all I survey:" Serkirk is the "monarch" because there is no one else there; unlike all other monarchs, he has no subjects.

Cowper's verse is perhaps so appealing because of this combination of anguished loneliness with a willed artistic balance: the balance of the poetry contrasts with the imbalance of the emotions they contain. As Cowper exclaims in one poem celebrating that Eighteenth-century pleasure, Nature controlled by Man, "How ill the scene that offers rest / And the heart that cannot rest, agree." His poetry might be said to share an emotional spectrum with Hardy's, or, more closely, Samuel Johnson's. Cowper too was interested in "life's little ironies", and could depict them with humanity and compassion. His ballad of John Gilpin (a real person, whose horse decided to take him on a race through London) is full of humour and a completely uncondescending appreciation of "ordinary life". John Gilpin's wife suggests that they take a holiday, but suggests that they bring their own wine:

John Gilpin kissed his loving wife;

O'erjoyed was he to find

That, though on pleasure she was bent,

She had a frugal mind.

Copwer, like Johnson, might have been said to have lived a life "radically wretched". This selection contains some truly pitiful and awesome (in the true senses of the words) poems written in, or about, his mental distress. In one of these Cowper tells of his belief that he is "damned below Judas". This perhaps explains the attraction of castaways such as Selkirk to Copwer. The Olney Hymns (some of which are included here) can have a similar strangled cry of loss:

Return, O holy Dove, return,

Sweet messenger of rest;

I hate the sins that made thee mourn,

And drove thee from my breast.

This edition also includes extracts from Cowper's one original long poem, 'The Task'. (The task was to write a long poem for a lady -- obviously of leisure -- "who liked blank verse".) I can't say that I'm much attracted to this poem: the blank verse seems to answer Dr Johnson's description of that metre as "prose lamed", and the reflexive, musing quality of the poem only remind me that I could be reading 'The Prelude': a poem that owes something (as Wordsworth would have been the first to admit) to 'The Task'.