SOURCE: Hutchings, W. “‘The Harmony of Things’: Denham's Coopers Hill as Descriptive Poem.” Papers on Language and Literature 19, No. 4 (Fall 1983): 375-84.

In the following essay, Hutchings maintains that, rather than merely serving as a vehicle for political commentary, the description of landscape in Coopers Hill gives the poem its structure and sense of order.

“Coopers Hill has been honored as a poem for three centuries, but it deserves to be more famous as a historical document.”¹ So John M. Wallace sets out the approach which his essay on Denham's poem displays so comprehensively; an approach towards which modern criticism has tended since Earl Wasserman's highly influential reading in The Subtler Language.² Wallace's argument, that Coopers Hill reveals its author's “Parliamentary Royalism” in a precise, historical context, and the interpretations which Brendan O Hehir bases upon his differentiation between versions of the text depend upon and derive from Wasserman's...