Cowper : William (1731-1800), one of the most widely read English poets of his day. In his sympathy with commonplace phenomena, his concern for the poor & downtrodden, he wrote of the joys & sorrows of everyday life.
... minor writers who formed the main current of verse during the time; of whom Erasmus Darwin &Gifford are the only notable ones. (4) The school of country life and the simpler feelings, consisting of Cowper and Crabbe.(5) The school of romantic poets & restorers of mediaevalism, consisting of Chatterton, Macpherson and Percy. (6) The Scotch lyric poets of whom Ferguson and Burns are the head. (7) William... later Elizabethans. The main influences of this school on future poetry are (1st) the habit of describing Nature for its own sake (2) the Thomsonian form of blank verse which was afterwards adopted by Cowper & Wordsworth and improved by Shelley (3) the use of the Spenserian stanza in narrative poetry (4) the sense for antiquity & for the picturesque as regards ruins (5) the habit of moralising on subjects ...
... production of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 are to be found in Gray's writings. Of the other poets of the time, Johnson & Goldsmith mark the last development of the Augustan style, while Collins, Blake, Cowper, Burns, Chatterton each embody in their poetry the beginnings of one or more tendencies which afterwards found their full expression in the nineteenth century. Gray alone seems to include in himself... made the language & metre of their poetry not only smooth & elegant, but formal and monotonous; the tendency was, as has been often said, to cut out poetry according to a uniform & mechanical pattern. Cowper said that Pope Made poetry a mere mechanic art; And every warbler has his tune by heart and Taine has expanded the charge in his History of English Literature, II p. 194, "One would say ...
... them have even been regarded as being off their chump: Blake was to most of his contemporaries a mad man. And two or three were actually inmates or at least temporary residents of Lunatic Asylums: Cowper, Christopher Smart and the Frenchman Gerard de Nerval. But in defence of the Poetic Art I may declare that in the case of these it was not poetry which drove them mad nor is it that they wrote poetry ...
... national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate finesse, the poetry ...
... metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical cult. Poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by a return to Miltonic blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form,—an influence which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley,—to lyrical movements, but more prominently the ...
... presage of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. A forerunner more immediate in time as well as in several moods is the effort made by poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton and Cowper in the third quarter of the eighteenth century to break away, in Sri Aurobindo's words, 5 "from the prison of the formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination ...
... "poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly power-ful". 19 Examples can be drawn from the work of Dryden and Pope, Cowper and Scott and Browning. On the vital plane the Teutonic element would be far more at home poetically than the Latin, for nervous vehemence and energy of character and rush of incident are natural to ...
... rigorously to just the words necessary to express the thought or feeling or to visualise what is described, without superfluous epithets, without images, without any least rhetorical turn in it. E.g. Cowper's Toll for the brave, The brave who are no more— is bare. Byron's Jehovah's vessels hold The godless heathen's wine; does not quite succeed because of a rhetorical tinge that ...
... rigorously to just the words necessary to express the thought or feeling or to visualise what is described, without superfluous epithets, without imagery, without any least rhetorical turn in it. E.g. Cowper's Toll for the brave— The brave! that are no more— is bare. Byron's Jehovah's vessels hold The godless Heathen's wine; does not quite succeed because of a rhetorical tinge that he has ...
... work of Shyamsundar Chakravarti. The verse skit was the supposed effusion of "Alexander-de-Convention during his unhappy abode in the Sleepy Hollow at Surat", and it was in obvious imitation of Cowper's Alexander Selkirk.51 The phrase "Sleepy Hollow" carried most of the indictment. The play - 'The Slaying of the Congress - a Tragedy in Three Acts" - was rather more elaborate and more pointed ...
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