SOURCE: “Solitude and Society,” in In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper, Bookman Associates, 1960, pp. 28-54.

In the following essay, Golden explores the symbolism in Cowper's poetry in an attempt to uncover the poet's attitudes about himself.

Cowper has been pictured variously as a friendly little man eager to proclaim his brotherhood with men, beasts, and insects; as a morose recluse, hating men and the world; as a psychotic hovering on the edge of terror at all times; as a frigidly aloof specimen of the breed that produced Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century gentleman. He is in part all of these, and I should like to examine his attitude toward himself in relation to the rest of the world in an attempt to discover whether any one category encloses him most, whether he is a shaky synthesis of all, or whether he is something else...