William Cowper Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Karen O’Brien

Critical Essay by Karen O’Brien

SOURCE: “‘Still at Home’: Cowper's Domestic Empires,” in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, St. Martin's Press, 1998, pp. 134-47.

In the following essay, O’Brien explores Cowper's interest in politics, particularly in British Imperialism.

Questions of William Cowper's sense of empire are like those of his ‘pre-romanticism’: more interesting in the details. The British Empire raises difficulties of style and poetic mode of address in Cowper's poetry which force him to a final reckoning with the traditions of eighteenth-century poetry, if not, ultimately, to the invention of anything we would conventionally describe as ‘romanticism’ or ‘romantic ideology’. Although he was later sentimentalized by the Victorians as the voice of hearth and heart, Cowper displayed in his poetry a robust interest in the politics of imperial expansion. For Cowper, as less obtrusively for Wordsworth and Coleridge, the empire defined the outer limits for a poetic sensibility centred...
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