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Picks up the story of conversion narrative among evangelical Anglicans through a close reading of three case studies. Associated with the town of Olney, John Newton, William Cowper, and Thomas Scott lived near one another in the north-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, where Newton and Scott were clergymen in the Church of England, and Cowper was a local gentleman-poet living on patronage. Like most evangelical Anglicans, they were moderate Calvinists when they wrote their narratives in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Calvinistic order of salvation provided a model for their self-understanding. However, in their autobiographies we find a vivid display of personality that appears not despite the presence of a model, but because of it. Within a similar theological framework, Newton interpreted his life typologically, Scott intellectually, and Cowper psychologically—each offering a unique expression of personal adherence to a common gospel.

This chapter discusses the retranslation of Greek epic poetry and argues for its importance in understanding how literary traditions shape the translation scenario. First, it treats the epic adaptations and translational practices of Roman authors, with particular focus on Ennius and Virgil. It also treats lesser-known translations of Greek epic from Roman times, and outlines the continuing history of Latin translation during the Renaissance, which was very influential for the burgeoning literatures of Western Europe. Then it details how this Latin tradition still informs the ‘classic’ English translations of George Chapman, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper, who still read their Greek under the strong influence not only of Latin literary values, but also of Latin translational practices. While the Latin tradition was highly influential in shaping European retranslation of Greek epic, that tradition itself effectively produced no translation on a par with Chapman's Homer or Dryden's Virgil.

Extending Walter Benjamin’s reflections on advocacy as translation—on the linguistic and ethicopolitical implications of witnessing, representing, and speaking-for—this chapter asks what it meant for two English poets, Christopher Smart and William Cowper, to write on behalf of animals. The advocate must find a form, at once inside and outside customary meaning, in which to translate an originary appeal into a normative language that otherwise fails to recognize it. Writing in the context of political reform and Evangelical revival, Smart, in Jubilate Agno, and Cowper, in The Task, claim authority, the public significance of their verse, by foregrounding the poetic labor of advocacy, their representation of the voices of those fellow creatures who are without authority. Mental pathology, Smart’s mania and Cowper’s melancholy, brought these poets closer to other animals while underlying their performance of vocational legitimacy, as self-possessed and entitled to authorship.

This chapter offers an introduction to parliamentary speaking in the later eighteenth century, a period in which Parliament extended its domestic authority and stood at the centre of an imperial state. The chapter discusses the increasing availability of parliamentary information, including the newspaper publication of debates and the emergence of new forms of writing about the business of the House. Using the correspondence of William Cowper as an example, it considers how these developments changed perceptions of Parliament and the public's engagement with parliamentary politics. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the methodological issues raised by the book, including the extent and quality of the extant sources, the challenge of reconstructing rhetorical performances and events, and the question of oratory's place within a general history of Parliament.

Chapter 4 examines how romantic-era lyricization emerges within the descriptive genres. In lyric, the narrator’s individual consciousness, buffeted by the shock and obscurity of modernity, provides the scale and focal point of the poem. The chapter begins with Cowper’s lyricized georgic The Task (1785), written in the catastrophic aftermath of the Laki eruption. As a volcanogenic haze migrates from Cowper’s descriptions of the countryside to the greenhouse and the city, he finds himself unable to distinguish seasonal cycles from eschatological presages or the modernization process embodied in worsening urban pollution. With the external world illegible, the narrator’s own search for a calling offers the only principle of formal closure. It turns next to Wordsworth’s locodescriptive poem “Tintern Abbey” (1798). The condition of possibility for Wordsworth’s lyric, where the individual finds relief from the psychic damage of modern life in an imagined reciprocity with nature, is a dematerialization of the planetary energy flows that support production. Finally, Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807) fluently links theories of the Earth with the climatic exigencies of conquest and commerce, rural labor with precise descriptions of the time sequences of flora, even as it also explores the lyric impulse to escape from an oppressive climate.

Chapter 3 begins the author-centred section of the book by examining William Cowper’s description of a group of gypsies in The Task (1783). It argues that Cowper’s lines reflect a burst of critical interest in gypsies which followed the repeal of the Egyptians Act in the same year, which can be encountered in journals Cowper read, and which is itself a major factor in the way in which gypsies begin to be represented in the Romantic period. It concludes that in Cowper’s vocabulary, and in the anxieties about wandering, idleness, usefulness, and sublimity his lines suggest, we can see the germ of many of the features in which this book as a whole is interested.

In this chapter, the garden becomes the stage for a series of paratactic readings that set Romantic poets like Friedrich Hölderlin and William Cowper alongside the twentieth-century artist and activist Derek Jarman. After describing the historical connection between parataxis and the Pindaric ode, it looks to Cowper's long poem The Task as an exploration of the unrepresentability of capital and its own Pindaric leap (or, in Marx's words, its salto mortale). The chapter then joins Cowper—via his short lyric, "The Rose"— to Jarman, whose diary entries and poems narrate a world on edge, battered by environmental and epidemiological crises. Following the late Derek Parfitt’s argument against an ethics of continuity between present and future agents or lives, the chapter ends by claiming parataxis as a figure that challenges the kind of presentist thinking that forces the past into a predictive relation with what is to come.

This chapter illustrates a strong connection between prayer and what I term radical interiority—a self defined by the authenticity of a supposed depth or secrecy—across the work of Evangelical poet William Cowper. Expressing this inward and grace-filled self is always accompanied by and conceived on the model of intense prayer; by contrast, prayerlessness equals spiritual desolation. The connection is particularly torturous in melancholic early texts such as Adelphi (his spiritual autobiography) and the Olney Hymns. In his most famous poem The Task, a poetics interlinking prayer and interiority continues: despite an initial elision in favour of hymning the natural world and focusing outside the self, it is reasserted through a quietist turn. Cowper’s final praying self retreats from the world, meditatively into itself but also in occupying hidden physical spaces as prayer closets, a combination inspired by his translations of French mystic, Madame de Guyon.

This chapter discusses a cluster of English verse translations of Milton’s Poemata that emerged in the long eighteenth century. Focusing on versions by Symmons, Cowper, and, to a lesser degree, Strutt and others, it foregrounds a variety of contexts—biographical, literary, discursive—that engendered, it is argued, an intellectual discourse on translational methodology that is still relevant today. It is a discourse, moreover, that raises a host of important theoretical questions: about the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a neo-Latin source text in a target language; the potential ‘fetters’ that, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the Verbal Copyer’, or perhaps the quasi-liberating fluency, described by Venuti as the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium.

This chapter examines the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell, who was prosecuted for a 1709 sermon attacking the Revolution of 1688–9 and the principles underlying it. The trial unleashed the worst violence seen on the streets of London since the civil wars and sparked one of the largest print controversies of the eighteenth century. Both William and Spencer Cowper played significant roles in Sacheverell's prosecution. Spencer was one of the team of lawyers, known as the ‘managers’, who set out the case against the doctor; William, as Lord Chancellor, presided over the whole process and delivered the verdict.

Dryden's practice, and that of his contemporaries, was characterized by the idea that they were translating an ‘author’ rather than a text. This metaphor expressed a particular practice of ‘imagining‐in’ via translation which I illustrate by comparing Dryden's translation from Homer with that of William Cowper (1791). To Cowper, the metaphor of translating an author seemed merely wilful; he adopted instead a metaphor of ‘adherence’ which (I show) grew in popularity during the early decades of the nineteenth century.

This chapter investigates attention’s affective shapes, focusing on how attention’s unusual relationship to terror and fear shifted as controversies about political alarmism emerged in the 1790s. Cowper’s “The Needless Alarm” and Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” worry in verse the unexpected proximity between alarmism and poetry. Both poems consider what Cowper calls “the sounds of war,” pushing apart the gap between sound and sense in order to consider the relation between poetic language and the “empty sounds” of propaganda and alarmism. But whereas Cowper imagines the poet’s own widening attention as fearless, Coleridge finds the simple act of attention inextricable from alarm. And whereas Cowper’s poem finds hope in a mode of listening to sound without thinking of it as the sound of something, Coleridge’s poem, itself more difficult to read, instead registers satirically the frightening impossibility of reading without suspicion.

This chapter challenges the common modern differentiation between religious poems and hymns, emphasizing the category of poetry that promoted piety in a range of forms. Isaac Watts was a pervasive influence. Multi-authored Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian hymn collections are examined, together with the methods and choices of the main editors, including the Wesleys, Whitefield, Ash and Evans, George Burder, and Andrew Kippis. The publishing and editing of poetry by a range of writers, famous and obscure, is compared. Milton, Young, and Cowper were the favourite religious poets, but many little-known writers published volumes of religious poetry or contributed to the religious magazines, with some of their poems being published posthumously. Readers and writers made extensive use of hymns and poems in private and in company, reading them in silence and aloud, quoting them in their manuscript journals and letters, and interweaving them in their prose publications.

Chapter 2 considers alternative evocations of the author’s body, focusing on how and why animal-bodies in the form of taxidermied remains are deployed as surrogates for the figure of the author within the writer’s house museum. It tours Arqua, Olney, London, Philadelphia, Coxwold, and Amherst in pursuit of the stories and fantasies old and new that lie behind the celebrity of Petrarch’s cat, Cowper’s hares, Poe’s raven, Sterne’s starling, and Dickinson’s hummingbirds. It argues that these animals serve to describe the doubled body of the author, at once dead and alive, mortal and immortal, body and voice, corpse and textual corpus.

This introduction discusses a variety of difficulties in the study of “attention,” focusing on the Romantic period in Britain as a particularly undisciplined and unruly moment when, despite various attempts to discipline it, attention oscillated from medicine to pedagogy, from philosophy to science, and from politics to poetics. 1798 emerges as a pivotal year for this crisis—when Alexander Crichton first diagnoses attention’s maladies, when Wordsworth laments the “savage torpor” in the minds of his readers, and when the British government amps up demands that every civilian keep watch for invasion. This confluence of concerns about attention sets the stage for a Romantic poetics that, following William Cowper, finds in the act of reading both absorption and loss, attention and lapse. William Blake’s poem “The Shepherd” exemplifies how the Romantic poetics of attention criticizes the militarization of attention and pastoral power, while also introducing gentler, alternatives modes of keeping watch.

This chapter discusses the vicissitudes of creative madness, enthusiasm, and inspiration in the eighteenth century, in relation to writing by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, whose satirical attacks damaged the viability of one side of the classical and Renaissance tradition. The chapter then discusses eighteenth-century ‘mad poets’ such as William Collins and William Cowper, and also Charlotte Smith, all of whom subsequently struggled to articulate formerly available ideas of creative madness. This tension is analysed through the discussion of mad poet figures as they appear in later eighteenth-century prospect poetry, in scenes of increasing mental precipitousness. The chapter concludes with a discussion of visual images of poetry and madness in these writers, Goya, and William Blake.

Chapter 7 forays into visionary spaces occupied by writers beyond the domestic. It explores how the processes of writing are imagined within, and more usually beyond, the everyday domestic, with time outside the public hours of the day, and space behind, above, or beyond the public spaces of the house. With special reference to William Cowper’s summerhouse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s hermitage at Ermenonville, Henry Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond, Alexandre Dumas’ Gothic folly, and Vita Sackville-West’s tower at Sissinghurst, it considers how writers have dramatized the writing life as an enviable life of the imagination led beyond the everyday and the ordinary, enabling it to plunge its roots deep into wider, national landscapes.

The book as a whole emphasizes a productive discontinuity between various eighteenth-century poets and both their Miltonic sources and their Romantic successors. Two interludes, however, qualify this picture by showing how a mortalist poetics, shared by the late Milton and some early Romantic writers, persisted in between the two in certain quarters of Enlightenment England. The second interlude interprets Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), still perhaps the eighteenth century’s most famous poem, alongside William Cowper’s Sapphic lyric “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion” (1774). While Gray’s elegy presents a disembodied heaven as no freer or happier than a common burial site, and worse for being more isolated, Cowper’s bleak poem imagines that hell offers his soul a kind of protection that he lacks during his embodied life on the earth’s surface.