SOURCE: “‘Meaner Themes’: Mock-Heroic and Providentialism in Cowper's Poetry,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 617-34.

In the following essay, Terry examines Cowper's mock-heroic poems, arguing that they are often allegories for providentialism. He also situates Cowper between the Augustans and the Romantics.

I

William Cowper's poetry has traditionally been seen in two opposite ways: either as a late relic of English Augustanism or as a harbinger of a newer romantic aesthetic.¹ This ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in his handling of one particular form: mock-heroic. While Cowper's adoption of the form affiliates him superficially with the earlier poetic era of Dryden and Pope, his use of it generates a range of moral sympathies that are very different from those in Augustan poems of the same kind. Cowper's mock-heroic, unlike that of earlier practitioners, has also tended to be seen as the projection...