The poem's ethical passages condemn slavery, the British Empire in India, blood sports, and cards. In The Task and his translations of Homer in the 1780s and '90s, Cowper attempted to revive the magic of Milton's blank verse. He also admired Prior's experiments in language. Cowper esteemed Pope in his youth, but later regarded his own poetry as a retreat back to the Miltonic wilderness in opposition to Pope's 'oily smoothness' and evasion of 'a manly rough line'. His chief complaint against Pope is that he made poetry a 'mere mechanic art'. Cowper associated Pope and the sparkle of smooth versification with the modish world he left behind in 1763. Cowper was irritated in 1779 when he had first read Johnson's treatment of Prior and Milton; he took exception to Johnson's disdain for blank verse, which he believed was the only form in English able to convey the inspired simplicity of Homer. He strongly identified with the 'poet-priest' calling of Milton, deliberately abandoning the heroic couplets of Pope and others to revert to the verse form of Paradise Lost (1667-74).

The Task is a pot-pourri of genres: topographical poetry, familiar epistle, devotional verse, moral satire, parody, Georgic, and mock-Miltonic verse. It brought Cowper widespread critical acclaim from contemporaries such as Robert Burns. The poem's descriptions of nature and emotional pitch resonated and found fuller expression in Wordsworth's autobiographical The Prelude (1850). The easy, conversational style that Wordsworth and Coleridge adopted for the Lyrical Ballads found its exemplar in The Task. In November 1786, Cowper moved to nearby Weston Underwood. Here he wrote many poems, published posthumously -- including the powerful (but unfinished) 'Yardley Oak' and 'The Poplar Field' -- and began his translation of Homer in the autumn of 1784. The Iliad was finished on September 23 1788; Cowper began translating the Odyssey (currently the standard Everyman edition) the next day. Published in 1791 in blank verse -- Cowper felt that Pope had tied 'bells of rhyme' about Homer's neck -- Cowper's Homer was the only book to bring him a significant financial return (though indifferent critical applause). Joseph Johnson next invited Cowper to undertake an edition of Milton, with illustrations by Henry Fuseli (who assisted with Cowper's revisions of Homer, finished in March 1799), but Cowper's deepening depression impeded significant progress before he died.

From late 1787 (following a bout of depression), Cowper's accomplished letters abound with apologies for delays in responding and complaints about his arduous life as a translator. A skilled balladist, Cowper also wrote under commission several antislavery ballads in 1788 (e.g. 'The Negro's Complaint'). He continued to write occasional ve! rse but was increasingly absorbed in translation. In April 1794, he received an annual royal pension of £300 through the pains of William Hayley, Cowper's first biographer. Mary Unwin's health deteriorated at the end of 1791. In 1793, Cowper wrote the moving stanzas, 'To Mary', commemorating his affection. In 1795, she and Cowper moved to Norfolk and settled at his cousin John Johnson's house in East Dereham in October 1796. After Mrs. Unwin's death in December, Cowper fell into a profound depression with no respite. He wrote 'Montes Glaciales' and 'The Cast-away', his finest lyric poem, during March 1799. The latter, published in 1803-4, compares the drowning of a sailor to Cowper's insuperable despair and intermittent insanity. Its narrator offers a striking comparison between the 'wretch' and himself:

From the end of the eighteenth century to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, William Cowper was probably the most widely read poet in England. Writers as diverse as Austen, Blake, Burns, Clare, Coleridge, Macaulay, Southey, and Wordsworth admired Cowper, and during the 'Romantic period', Cowper's verse was seen to have been audaciously original and critical in bringing new subject matter into poetry. His influence on the early Romantics was very powerful. Coleridge identified Cowper and William Bowles as the first poets 'who combined natural thought with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head'. Recognising the novelty of Cowper's work, the critic Francis Jeffrey remarked in 1811 that Cowper had attained his popular position by setting 'at defiance all the imaginary requisites of poetical diction and classical imagery -- dignity of style, and politeness of phraseology', and venturing to write with 'force and freedom', using 'natural phrases and natural images'.

James King's illuminating critical biography (1986) shows how Cowper's influence on Romanticism lies also in his treatment of the sublime. Whereas the poets of mid-century, such as Gray and Collins, were concerned with the 'rhetorical sublime', Cowper was interested in the 'religious sublime', evoking poetry of true compassion and emotion from ordinary subject matter. His Milton was the poet of Paradise Lost who generated sublime feelings in describing a multiplicity of circumstances. Cowper's willingness in h! is poetry to sublimate his own retiring life helped to legitimise Wordsworth's recreation of the intensely felt 'spots of time' from his childhood and adolescence. King rightly says that Cowper's attempt to redefine the heroic sublime of Homer at variance with Pope's is an important contribution to aesthetics. Cowper's language is largely free from the 'poetic diction' that marked the school of Pope. Without Cowper's example, then, Romanticism might have taken a different course, or toiled harder to authenticate its artistic credentials.

Throughout the nineteenth century, there were numerous new editions of Cowper's poetry and (after 1803) letters. Norma Russell's Bibliography lists over a hundred editions of his poems in Britain, and almost fifty in America between 1782 and 1837, the year Southey completed the Life and Works of Cowper. John Clare acknowledged Cowper as an influence on his political verse: 'Byron's calling Cowper no poet is the best literary hoax I ever heard of', he recorded in 1821. Yet, Cowper soon after lost ground with more sophisticated readers, which he was to regain to some extent in the Victorian period (he was ever popular with the 'religious classes'). From the 1840s until the late 1970s, interest in Cowper's poetry was largely restricted to specialist scholars and the practicing Christians who sang his hymns in church, usually with no awareness of his name. Despite falling into obscurity duri! ng the nineteenth century, his writings have recently come to occupy a key position in the English literary canon. Almost all of the anthologies of eighteenth century and Romantic literature published in the last twenty years have included significant selections from Cowper's poetry. Recent scholarly editions of his essays, letters, and translations are legion. There is also a growing critical interest in his work and life, with book-length studies by Bill Hutchings (1983), Vincent Newey (1982), and Martin Priestman (1983); and important discussions by critics such as Marshall Brown (1991) and Tim Fulford (1996) that link his work to key currents in the development of Romanticism.

Despite the 'death of the author', proclaimed by some literary theorists, it is clear that criticism of Coleridge at least is flourishing to judge by the several single-author studies that have appeared within the last decade -- and authorship remains a basic tenet of critical practice. Cowper has intrigued biographers, literary critics, psychoanalysts, and hymnologists. Nonetheless, he is still one of the most neglected poets of the period possibly perhaps because his poetry has always seemed univocal and less complex than that of the Augustans. Cowper is not championed from the standpoint of such radical theoretical perspectives as Marxism, feminism, and various forms of post-structuralism. D.J. Enright's essay on Cowper in the Pelican Guide to English Literature (1957) -- typical of the critical disregard for Cowper and the belief that he was a lesser Romantic poet -- adjudged him one of England's 'most pleasant and most individual of our minor poets'. Such observations and judgments give a misleading impression of an undemanding and undistinguished poet, however.

George M. Ella's study (1993) notes that around forty-five detailed biographies of Cowper have appeared since 1800. Indeed, the twentieth century was more ! interested in Cowper's biography and psychosis than in Cowper the poet. Biography burgeoned under the momentum of argument over the causes of Cowper's madness, prompted by the Anglican press's assertion that Cowper's malady was a terrible warning against the consequences of Calvinism (e.g. Sydney Smith's articles on 'Methodism' in The Edinburgh Review). Successive writers have debated the rapport between Cowper's religion and poetical inspiration. This polemic and impulse to 'biographise' Cowper has diverted attention from his specifically literary accomplishments, however. Hugh l'Anson Fausset (1928) and Lord David Cecil (1929) argued that Calvinism deformed his talent and drove him to madness, while Norman Nicholson (1951) held that his religious experiences 'lifted him like a love affair above day-to-day monotony', pointing out that Cowper's 'madness' predated his contact with the Evangelical revival. Like Gilbert Thomas (1948), Nicholson argued that Evangelicism was the catalyst that released his latent sympathy with Man and Nature. Fausset's work ushered in a wave of psychological speculations about Cowper's writings and personality. Morris Golden's psycho-dramatic In Search of Stability (1960), while stressing the universality of Cowper's simultaneous yearnings for solitude and society, and freedom and authority, failed to reveal precisely how Cowper's preoccupations were artistically expressed.