SOURCE: Baird, John D. “Cowper's Conception of Truth.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 7 (1978): 367-73.

In the following essay, Baird clarifies Cowper's representation of divine truth in the poems “The Progress of Error” and “Truth.”

William Cowper's poetical activity extended over half a century, from “Verses written at Bath on finding the heel of a shoe,” composed in 1748 when he was sixteen, to a scrap of translation from Homer written a few months before his death on April 25, 1800. His contemporary fame, and his present reputation, rest upon the two volumes he published in his early fifties: Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq., published in 1782, and his masterpiece, The Task, published in 1785. While a knowledge of Cowper's concept of truth—more strictly, religious truth—is necessary to a full understanding of all his mature poetry, its importance is most obvious in connection with the first two poems of...