SOURCE: Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “William Cowper: The Heightened Perception.” In The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets, pp. 165-206. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Spacks assesses Cowper as a writer of hymns, considers his poetic technique, and offers a stylistic and thematic survey of The Task.

As a writer of hymns, William Cowper is more renowned than [Christopher] Smart; his contributions to the Olney Hymns have been admired and sung for almost two centuries. If Smart's hymns gain much of their power from a vision turned freshly outward, Cowper's (to which Smart was a subscriber) depend as heavily on the quality of perception directed within. Several commentators have observed that a personal record of psychological distress and recovery is perceptible in his sequence of hymns. The hymns, says Lodwick Hartley, “represent various stages and aspects of the poet's struggle for faith: an ebb and a...