SOURCE: Radcliffe, David Hill. “These Delights from Several Causes Move: Heterogeneity and Genre in ‘Coopers Hill’.” Papers on Language and Literature 22, No. 4 (Fall 1986): 352-71.

In the following essay, Radcliffe contends that throughout Coopers Hill Denham “champions heterogeneous rather than totalizing ways of thinking” and “combines differing points of view, a variety of ideological positions, and a mixture of literary conventions.”

Eighteenth-century poets and critics agreed that John Denham was a seminal writer in the history of English literature.¹ Coopers Hill played an important role in the reorganization of the hierarchy of poetic genres which took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; within a few decades after the publication of Coopers Hill, the georgic and related didactic forms challenged the epic and tragedy as the major poetic genres in England.² With the passing of the eighteenth-century, however, Denham's reputation waned to the point where, today, his famous poem...