SOURCE: “William Cowper: State, Society, and Countryside,” in Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 121-153.

In the following essay, Feingold analyzes The Task, focusing on its public aspects.

The idiosyncrasies of William Cowper's poetic career create an obvious difficulty for a study dealing with his work in a context wider than that provided by the man's life and work themselves. Cowper's life was tormented by a set of symptoms, habits, and fears which his poetry in many places reflects. It seems perfectly reasonable to maintain that whatever can be explained about Cowper's poetry will need to be carefully qualified by referring to his peculiar biography, particularly when we consider that Cowper turned to poetry for reasons intimately connected with the torment his life at times became for him.

The importance of Cowper's biography cannot be denied, but its significance...