SOURCE: Griffin, Dustin. “Redefining Georgic: Cowper's Task.” ELH 57, no. 4 (winter 1990): 865-79.

In the following essay, Griffin views The Task as an eighteenth-century modification of the classical Georgic poetic form, while arguing that it depicts a more privatized and spiritualized conception of labor and its relation to the divine order than its predecessors.

Cowper's Task strikes most readers as a long and meandering discursive poem, divided rather arbitrarily into six books, and unified by little more than its concern with rural pleasures. Does the poem in fact have any clearer focus, any generic principle of order? My suggestion is that while the poem does not display the kind of unity or coherence one finds in a narrative long poem like Paradise Lost, or in an expository theodicy like An Essay On Man, it nonetheless possesses more than just the single “tendency” that Cowper claimed for it in a famous...