William Cowper: Selected Poems

By William Cowper

Book Overview

The poems of William Cowper (1731-1800) are best known outside their literary context, as hymns or half-remembered popular ballads. This selection reveals the qualities that have made Cowper's work enduringly loved: his gentle humor and detailed, delighted observations of the incidentals of everyday life, his intimate, conversational tone, his spiritual hunger. Beneath Cowper's quiet gratitude for everyday pleasures, though, is a darker sense of loss, a longing for stability and calm. His sense of the healing and life-affirming power of poetry gives them a profound humanity. Nick Rhodes' selection includes the finest of the short poems and substantial extracts from Cowper's longer works, including The Task, the poem from which the Romantic poets took their bearings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415969417
• ISBN13: 9780415969413
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.5"