SOURCE: Heller, Deborah. “Cowper's Task and the Writing of a Poet's Salvation.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 35, no. 3 (summer 1995): 575-98.

In the following essay, Heller interprets The Task as Cowper's effort to sublimate his personal belief that he was spiritually condemned into a poetic manifestation of God's approval.

I

In the summer of 1764, while a patient at St. Albans Asylum for the Insane, William Cowper underwent a conversion to Calvinist Evangelicalism. During an intense bout of paranoia and self-contempt, he found a faith to save him from despair, a revivalist brand of Calvinism which stressed the absolute efficacy of faith and the uselessness or “filthy rags” of human effort. The keynotes of this theology are sounded in the Memoir Cowper wrote several years later, in which he describes the precise moment of his conversion. He recalls searching the scriptures for “comfort and instruction” and discovering some apt verses...