Abstract
A this chapter title attests, no eighteenth-century poem makes its instructive purpose plainer than William Cowper’s The Task (1785). The title of the poem indicates its teacherly orientation. One way to understand the task of Cowper is to see it as the task of attention. As he describes his undertaking, “The task of new discov’ries falls on me” (1.218).1 He invites the reader to learn and participate in this venture. The task of new discoveries becomes our task. David Fairer has called The Task “a six-book poem that holds the reader’s interest through an extraordinary range of topics.”2 I would add that that poem not only holds readers’ interest during its reading but hones readers’ interest so that they might apply it beyond the poem. Like many of the poets I examined in the previous two chapters, Cowper practices mobile attention: walking. He wanders far, deliberately priming a wide field of remote attractors, though the yield comes as no surprise to him. He knows from long and repeated experience what he is after. And he makes the rewards of attention available and appealing as a process and series of steps for readers to follow.
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Notes
All references to William Cowper’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in The Poems of William Cowper, eds. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), II:122.
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003), 231.
Charles Peake, ed., introduction to Poetry of Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 19.
Tim Fulford, “‘Nature’ Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 121.
Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 60.
In his essay “Cowper, Wordsworth, and the Sacred Moment of Perception,” David J. Leigh examines what he calls “the moment of sacred perception” in Cowper’s Task (58), though his focus is on Cowper’s perception of spiritual truths, as they are embodied in the concrete. See this essay in The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 54–72.
Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), 107.
See Ann Yearsley, Poems on Various Subjects (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787; Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994). Citations refer to the Woodstock edition.
In her essay “Women Poets and Their Writing in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Charlotte Grant comments of this passage: “Yearsley distinguishes, as Anne Finch had done earlier from a very different subject position, her relation to the landscape from that of men” (120). See chapter 8 of A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 111–26.
This remark comes from Eliot’s essay “Worldliness and Other-World-liness: The Poet Young.” It appears in Terry’s Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 160. Terry devotes an entire chapter (chapter 7, “Mock-Heroic and Grace: The Case of Cowper”) to Cowper and makes this comparison of Cowper to his Augustan mock-heroic ancestors: “In the poems by Swift and Fielding, the low thing is rebuked by association with the high one whose image it signally fails to live up to. But, in the hands of a different kind of poet (such as William Cowper), the low thing can find itself raised or celebrated by being broached in the context of images drawn from the higher register” (15).
Tim Fulford makes a fascinating comment about Cowper’s refusal to partake fully in the authoritative position of the eminence: “Only by continuing on a restless journey can the poet find a position both of security and authority, solitude and social power. This journey (Cow-per’s task) is carefully staged in the verse as a progress through a picturesque scene towards a position of eminence (real but also rhetorical) from which command of a field more usually experienced as divided can be briefly taken.” Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59.
Mark Akenside, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).
Joseph Addison, “Spectator No. 412,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3:541.
Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002).
All references to James Thomson’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence, 2 vols., ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
See Stevens[0], “The Snow Man,” Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 10.
Ambrose Philips, “A Winter-Piece” (1709), in The Poems of Ambrose Philips, ed. M. G. Segar (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1937), 90–91. This poem was originally titled “To the Earl of Dorset.”
See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 33.
For several additional examples, see Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2012); Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004); and Ellen Langer, Mindfulness (New York: Perseus Books, 1989).
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© 2012 Margaret Koehler
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Koehler, M. (2012). Cowper’s Task of Attention. In: Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313607_8
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