'Childish Prattlement'

Though often quite mad, William Cowper was an amusing fellow, especially when not in the grip of religious mania. His humor sometimes sounds modern, even hip or absurdist, a little like Charles Lamb in the next generation who also experienced periods of lapsed sanity. Take Cowper’s “To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut on Which I Dined This Day,” an unapologetically mock-serious and very silly poem written in 1784, which concludes:

“Thy lot thy brethern of the slimy fin

Would envy, could they know that thou wast doom’d

To feed a bard, and to be prais’d in verse.”

Cowper likewise addressed poems to hares (he kept three: Puss, Tiney and Bess), dogs and grasshoppers. He was an egalitarian among his fellow creatures and found human vanity a bottomless source of deflationary humor. The other side of Cowper’s abhorrence of mankind’s sinfulness and depravity was his taste for mocking it. In the following passage, from a letter he wrote to his friend the Rev. William Unwin on this date, Oct. 31, in 1779, Cowper could be making fun of social media and most digital communications:

“I wrote my last letter merely to inform you that I had nothing to say; in answer to which you have said nothing. I admire the propriety of your conduct though I am a loser by it. I will endeavour to say something now, and shall hope for something in return.”

Cowper is both funny and gracious, and devotes the rest of his letter to outrage over Dr. Johnson’s demolition of John Milton. Johnson published the fifty-two bio-critical sketches that make up Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets between 1779 and 1781. In his “Life of Milton” he famously writes of “Lycidas”:

“In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.”

Cowper, an informal critic at best, fumes: “[Johnson’s] treatment of Milton is unmerciful to the last degree. A pensioner is not likely to spare a republican; and the Doctor, in order, I suppose, to convince his royal patron of the sincerity of his monarchical principles, has belaboured that great poet's character with the most industrious cruelty.”

Like most great critics, Johnson has his weak spots, uttering outrageous judgments that make little sense to us. Unlike lousy critics, though, Johnson gives us something worth thinking about even when he’s patently wrong. Cowper will have none of it. He takes Johnson's dismissals personally:  

“He has passed sentence of condemnation upon 'Lycidas,' and has taken occasion, from that charming poem, to expose to ridicule, (what is indeed ridiculous enough,) the childish prattlement of pastoral compositions, as if 'Lycidas' was the prototype and pattern of them all. The liveliness of the description, the sweetness of the numbers, the classical spirit of antiquity that prevails in it, go for nothing. I am convinced by the way, that he has no ear for poetical numbers, or that it was stopped by prejudice against the harmony of Milton’s.”

Even the gentle Cowper turns ad hominem: “Oh! I could thresh his old jacket, till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.”