SOURCE: Golden, Morris. “Solitude and Society.” In In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper, pp. 28-54. New York: Bookman Associates, 1960.

In the following essay, Golden surveys the myriad ways in which Cowper's mental attitudes and instabilities—including feelings of isolation, delusion, victimization, abandonment, despair, and divine rapture—are reflected in his poetry.

Cowper has been pictured variously as a friendly little man eager to proclaim his brotherhood with men, beasts, and insects; as a morose recluse, hating men and the world; as a psychotic hovering on the edge of terror at all times; as a frigidly aloof specimen of the breed that produced Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century gentleman. He is in part all of these, and I should like to examine his attitude toward himself in relation to the rest of the world in an attempt to discover whether any one category encloses him...