Abstract
In the eighteenth century, Virgil’s Georgics provided a model for poems that directly imitated Virgil’s didactic manner—like John Dyer’s The Fleece—and for poems that were “georgic” in the broader sense that they took agriculture as a subject. The georgic mode came to a stop, however, with or not long after William Cowper’s long poem The Task (1785). Whether critics view The Task as a georgic poem, or as a heterogeneous collation of different modes including georgic and mock-georgic, they have agreed that it is hard to find significant georgic poems written after 1785.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Dustin Griffin has suggested that The Task “redefines georgic” by “redefining labor … as a virtually spiritual activity, and … shifting attention from the public sphere to the private.” Richard Feingold, on the other hand, feels that the poem’s failure is the real riddle to be explained; he discusses The Task as a sensitive, but essentially doomed, effort to fit late-eighteenth-century society into an antiquated poetic mode. Dustin Griffin, “Redefining Georgic: Cowper’s Task,” English Literary History 57.4 (1990): 876.
Richard Feingold, Nature and Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978): 121–92.
John Dyer, The Fleece, Minor Poets of the Eighteenth Century, ed. H. Fausset (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 3:22–26.
James King, William Cowper:A Biography (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 155.
Francis Jeffrey, rev. of The Dramatic Works of John Ford, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, ed. Henry Weber, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, 1944), 2:294.
The survey covered middle-class memoirs, diaries, letters, and family records in the East and West Midlands between 1780 and 1850. “Cowper is easily the most quoted writer in the records from both areas … usually occupying a place of honour.” The authors indicate that this remains true throughout the period of their study. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157, 157n.
Martin Priestman has similarly argued that Cowper’s Task struggles to reconcile a Christian work ethic with a tradition of retirement poetry. Martin Priestman, Cowper’s Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 96.
Feingold, Nature and Society, 5–7. See also C. A. Moore, “Whig Panegyric Verse, 1700–1760,” PMLA 41 (1926): 362–401.
Virgil , The Georgics, trans. L.P. Wilkinson (New York: Penguin, 1982), 1.197–201.
Dwight L. Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 33–35.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 94 [4:618–22].
Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” Poems, ed. I. Donaldson (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 88.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 29–31.
In saying this, I echo John Chalker’s observation that Thomson’s “sensitively serious eighteenth-century imitation of the Georgics” was both more important for and more representative of its time than more formal imitations such as John Philips’s Cyder (1708) or John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) that retain the Virgilian didactic structure. John Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 92.
James Thomson, “Summer,” The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. L. Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 1438–45.
“Labour n. s. 2.The act of doing what requires a painful exertion of strength, or wearisome perseverance.” Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Strahan, 1755). Likewise, Burke’s description of the sublime as a kind of inward labor postulates a resistance overcome, since “labour is a surmounting of difficulties“ (Burke’s italics). Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 135.
“In agriculture too nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expence, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workmen.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1:363 (II.v.12).
William Cowper, letter to William Unwin, October 10, 1784, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 285.
Priestman, Cowper’s Task, 3, 14. See also Dorothy Hadley Craven, “Cowper’s Use of ‘Slight Connection’ in The Task: A Study in Structure and Style,” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1953).
William Cowper, “Table Talk,” The Poems of William Cowper, ed. J. D. Baird and C. Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1:257. The lines are, significantly enough, placed in the mouth of the Whig speaker in a Whig-Tory dialogue.
Cowper’s Task is followed by a long tradition of nineteenth-century works in which the activity of walking has to support this sort of medico-moral argument. Examining Cowper, William Wordsworth, H. D. Thoreau, George Eliot, and John Burroughs, among others, Anne D. Wallace’s Walking, Literature, and English Culture concludes that the georgic mode is replaced by a new mode she names “peripatetic,” which puts the walker in “the ideological space vacated by the farmer,” and “represents excursive walking as a cultivating labour capable of renovating both the individual and his society by recollecting and expressing past value.” Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11.
Wallace, Walking, 95–102. Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 61–82.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 1:1589, 1:785.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1:179, 1:181.
Copyright information
© 2005 Ted Underwood
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Underwood, T. (2005). Cowper’s Spontaneous Task. In: The Work of the Sun. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981905_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981905_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52928-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8190-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)