SOURCE: O'Brien, Karen. “‘Still at Home’: Cowper's Domestic Empires.” In Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, edited by Thomas Woodman, pp. 134-47. London: Macmillan, 1998.

In the following essay, O'Brien probes Cowper's juxtaposition of private and public concerns, and his moral focus on the still, small, quiet and humble in The Task.

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...