“He dwells alone:” The Image of Completeness in the Self in Cowper’s “The Snail”

Following the critical lines of Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, the present study aims at conveying how William Cowper, the much acclaimed English poet of the 18th century, presents in his 1799 poem “The Snail” the image of an individual possessing completeness in the self. Not only is Cowper’s snail content with life in seclusion, but also abhors the intrusion of an outsider in its private domain. The article aims at investigating how the snail’s world of completeness bears both the somatic and the psychic dimensions and also how the creature exists in that world narcissistically. Concomitantly, the article would probe into the association between the world of the snail and the poet’s longing to attain sufficiency in the self at a time he is left alone. It would be conveyed how the snail of the poem embodies the poet’s projected self in its idealised form, something which following the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan can be called the poet’s “ideal ego,” than an insignificant creature engrossed merely in nourishment on vegetation. Keywords: Cowper, completeness, private world, self, The Snail.

‘The solitary saint walks forth to meditate at even-tide’

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.

Romantic Prayer

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

William Cowper (1731 - 1800)

Portrait of the poet William Cowper

Engraved plate of William Cowper

Blake's engraved portrait of the poet William Cowper

The Romantic Essay and the City

This chapter explores the ambivalence of the Romantic familiar essay form towards the city by looking at the two main literary tributaries that fed into it—the current of self-consciously pro-metropolitan prose writing that had been inaugurated by Steele and Addison, and the more anti-commercial tradition of retirement poetry epitomized by William Cowper and the Lake poets. It looks at the way in which Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb in particular strove to bury their continuing misgivings about the polis as a centre of commercial rapacity and unruly popular politics in celebrations of the city as being, under certain controlled conditions, a precious haven of imaginative activity, personal reminiscence, and literary tradition. Their aim, even if it was never quite articulated as such, was to turn the Romantic periodical essay into a prose medium that was as sensitive as Wordsworth’s poetry to the ravages of recent historical change, while maintaining, in the end, a more progressive and forward-looking attitude to it.

El espejo y la máscara: dos versiones de Alexander Selkirk en Jorge Luis Borges y William Cowper

En 1963, Jorge Luis Borges publicó un soneto titulado “Robinson Crusoe”. Posteriormente, cambió el nombre de su composición a “Alexander Selkirk”. El presente artículo explica dicho cambio como un intento por parte de Borges por subvertir la figura icónica del náufrago emprendedor, representada no sólo por Crusoe sino por los recuentos contemporáneos del Selkirk histórico, una de las inspiraciones de Defoe. Por otro lado, se compara el poema de Borges con una de sus posibles fuentes, un texto del poeta de finales del siglo XVIII, William Cowper. Ambos poemas están escritos en una primera persona cuya voz poética se identifica con Selkirk, por lo que pueden ser estudiados como monólogos dramáticos.

Banter, Nonsense, and Irony

The Nonsense Club was a confederacy of writers who gathered around the polemical satirist Charles Churchill and his friend Robert Lloyd during the 1760s. Churchill was celebrated as an opposition polemicist, but other members of the Club—including Lloyd, George Colman, Bonnell Thornton, and William Cowper—adopt a less direct, often self-conscious satiric mode, marked by a nonchalant awareness of their work’s ultimate lack of effect. This results in an odd mix of outspoken critique, bracing satiric barbs, almost affectionate parody, and incidental, and ad hoc considerations of the purpose of writing itself. The present account offers a survey of the Club’s poetic satire: its attitude towards contemporary poetry, most notable in satires and burlesques; the small but clear originality in the work of Lloyd; and the satire of Churchill, the most immediately consequential poet to emerge from the group.