'Care for True Art in Homely Things'

“I wonder why it is that I like Cowper as I do?” 

I’ve asked myself that question. I read William Cowper’s verse more often than Wordsworth’s or Shelley’s. I’ve done that for so long I know what to avoid – the cringingly sentimental stuff and earnest sermonizing. Cowper is a formidably uneven poet, a man of his time and frequently quite insane, but he was the drollest of madmen.

 

The questioner quoted above is Edwin Arlington Robinson in an April 22, 1894 letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith. For the previous week he had been reading Cowper’s masterwork, The Task (1785). Robinson is twenty-four and not yet a poet:

 

“Something tells me that he is not, and never will be, one of the really great poets, although in occasional passage[s] he is well nigh unsurpassable. There is much of the sandy desert in his work, but still it is comfortable travelling. The green and glorious places that come every little while are all the brighter for the comparative barren[-]ness around them.”

 

This is accurate and recalls a memorable passage from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of The Task, lines 88-93, that begins:

 

“’Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,

To peep at such a world; to see the stir

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjur’d ear.”

 

That phrase, “loopholes of retreat,” has spawned a thousand wayward thoughts, in me and in William Hazlitt, who writes in “On Living to One’s Self”: “He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of the retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray…” The phrase is so attractive and useful, Hazlitt recycled it for use in a chapter in Lectures on the English Poets, “On Swift, Young, Gray, Collins &c.” He writes of Thomas Gray:

 

“He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on ‘those reverend bedlams, college, and schools!’ He had nothing to do but to read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought.”

 

Both of Hazlitt’s passages might apply to Robinson, a famously diffident, retiring man. Back to his letter, where one notices even more self-identification:

 

“His religion is akin to mawkish to a man of my doubts, but I readily overlook that in the consideration of his temperament and his surroundings. He is popularly and justly, I suppose, called feminine; but human nature has a word to say regarding such matters, and a little sympathy is not likely to be wasted upon this poet. His timidity was a disease, and the making of verse and rabbit-hutches, together with gardening, was his occupation. He was a strange man; and this strangeness, with his almost pathetic sincerity, go take [sic] to make up the reason for my fondness for his poetry. He stands between Thomson and Wordsworth, and for some reason, he seems to stand upon pretty firm ground. I do not think another half-century will disturb him to any great extent. His description of the wood-cutter and his dog cannot die while men and women care for true art in homely things.”

 

With the "wood-cutter" allusion, Robinson refers to a passage from Book V, “The Winter Morning Walk,” of The Task beginning “Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned / The cheerful haunts of men . . .”

 

When writing about Cowper I like to boost the Irish poet Brian Lynch’s fine novel about the poet and his suffering, The Winner of Sorrow (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), in which a character says to the poet: “Misery usually stands in the way of creation, William, but in your case it opens the road . . . because you know that composing puts off your being decomposed.”