SOURCE: “Homer: The Heroic Task,” in William Cowper, a Biography, Duke University Press, 1986, pp. 189-218.

In the following essay, King details Cowper's experience of translating Homer's Illiad and Odyssey.

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Cowper's translation into English blank verse of the Iliad and Odyssey was the most complex literary project in which he ever became involved. Up to the publication of The Task in 1785, Cowper had been a gentleman who wrote verses for publication, but with Homer he frequently saw himself as a professional writer dedicated to fame and royalties. Although he referred occasionally in his extant correspondence to his habits as a composer of verse from 1779 to 1784,¹ the letters from late 1785 to 1791² are concerned with little more than the translation of Homer and provide the only extended view we have of Cowper the literary craftsman at work. And in those letters, a very determined, frequently passionate, and often aggressive William Cowper...