William Cowper was born in 1731 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. The oldest of his siblings, Cowper lost his mother at six years old and became close with her family, who encouraged his early interest in reading. He trained for a law career and attempted to take on a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords, but the stress of the required examination exacerbated his ongoing depression. He was institutionalized for some time at the Collegium Insanorum at St. Albans, an experience that brought him a zealous new belief in evangelical Christianity.
After his recovery, Cowper took a room with the Unwins, a married couple in Huntingdon, with whom he got along so well that the trio moved to Olney. When the Reverend Unwin died from a fall off a horse, Cowper became romantically attached to his widow, Mary, and continued to live with her for the rest of her life. He met clergyman John Newton and worked with him on the Olney Hymns, a hymnbook including “Amazing Grace,” written by Newton, and the first usage of Cowper’s famous term “God moves in a mysterious way.”
During Cowper’s continued mental health struggles, Mary Unwin helped redirect his energies to writing poetry. Several years’ worth of output was collected in his celebrated debut poetry volume, Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. He also wrote the highly regarded six-volume The Task, inspired by a prompt from a friend to write about his sofa in blank verse, and translated The Iliad and The Odyssey, among other projects. Mary Unwin died in 1796, and Cowper fell into a final depression. His last work before his death by dropsy in 1800 was “The Castaway,” a grim memorial of the loss of his love.
Cowper’s poetry, which incorporated workaday life and English countryside imagery, is considered to be a major precursor to the Romantic movement. He was also an abolitionist, and one of his anti-slavery poems, “The Negro's Complaint,” was frequently quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. Although less well known now, in his day he may have been read more than any other English poet.
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More William Cowper
Text: Read more poetry by Cowper at the Academy of American Poets
Resource: Learn about Cowper and Newton through the Cowper & Newton Museum at Cowper's former home
Text: Read ebooks of Cowper's works at Project Gutenberg