'The Flowering Shrubs of His Letters'

To some writers we feel an unbudgeable loyalty that defies critical understanding and even good taste. I can’t defend my love of Sherwood Anderson’s stories and no longer feel the need to do so. At some point a reader gives up trying to impress others with his sophistication, accepts his eccentricities of taste and resolves to enjoy himself with books the tastemakers frown upon. Such are the letters and poems of William Cowper (1731-1800). My Everyman’s Library edition of his Poems (1931) is readily reachable on the shelf closest to my desk, next to E.A. Robinson, a much greater poet who once wrote: 

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

 

Which likewise describes some of Robinson’s own later work. In 2006, the poet W.S. Di Piero published a prose selection, “Semba!: A Notebook,” including a brief passage about Cowper:

 

“William Cowper cannily and amicably conceals his secret suicidal melancholia in the flowering shrubs of his letters, which craft a rather wholesome, amiable personality, but he admits to ‘[putting] on an air of cheerfulness and vivacity to which I am in reality a stranger.’ It was ‘the arduous task of being merry by force. . . . Despair made amusements necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement.’ He lived with the unwanted companion and made himself a good one. His pain, his madness, was the raised, rough grain of his sense of failure in belief, in life as devotion. To feel unworthy of God is, in derangement, to be convinced of being unworthy of life.”

 

Part of the drama of reading Cowper’s letters is observing him alternately confessing and concealing his periodically suicidal depression. His sense of wonder and delight is genuine but sometimes reads like self-administered therapy. Here he is on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful:

 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, `The maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

 

Here is Cowper writing to another friend, the Rev. Robert Unwin, on Jan. 17, 1782:

 

“To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, and without seeming to displace a single syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.”

 

In a letter to Unwin, always his stalwart friend, written on April Fool’s Day in 1782, shortly after publishing his first volume of verse, Cowper thanks him for publicizing the publication: “I could not have found a better trumpeter.” When not insane, Cowper was the wittiest and most gracious of men. He never says “thank you” when a more baroque expression of gratitude is handy. Two sentences later, and extending the musical metaphor, Cowper writes:

 

“Methinks I see you with the long tube at your mouth, proclaiming to your numerous connections my poetical merits and at proper intervals levelling it at Olney, and pouring into my ear the welcome sound of their approbation. I need not encourage you to proceed, your breath will never fail in such a cause; and thus encouraged, I myself perhaps may proceed also, and when the versifying fit returns produce another volume.”

 

The same man in his poem “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” can write: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.”