SOURCE: “William Cowper's New Aesthetic in The Task,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 264, 1989, pp. 1080-84.

In the following essay, King outlines some factors contributing to the final structure of The Task. He cites various social movements of the time and compares Cowper to Laurence Sterne.

At the time of its publication in 1785, William Cowper's The Task was a critical and popular success. However, even its earliest reviewers complained about the poem's lack of unity. Even while he was in the midst of writing the poem, Cowper was aware of this problem, as he told his friend, William Unwin, on 10 October 1784: ‘If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect however I do not think it altogether indefensible) it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the preceding passage.’

My paper attempts to demonstrate why The Task took the...