Hope and Despair in the Writings of William Cowper

How do literary texts express hope and despair? And how does the form of literary texts affect the hopes and despairs they embody? Every genre is also an interpretation that shapes the way the writer understands experience and the way the audience expects to see it handled. A spiritual autobiography and a modern clinical memoir might both tell the story of descent into the depths of despair and recovery from it, but the spiritual autobiography will ascribe despair to sin and redemption to grace, whereas the clinical memoir will ascribe despair to chemical imbalance and recovery to therapy. Differences like these affect not only the tone and style of a literary work, but the meaning it has for its author and its readers.

The writings of the 18th century poet William Cowper (1731--1800) offer an especially useful laboratory for the study of such questions. Cowper was an eloquent poet and prose writer, skilled in employing a variety of literary forms. He was also afflicted with what we would now call a severe affective disorder (Jamison, 62). It subjected him to periodic depressions that ended in madness and elevated him with recoveries that seemed miraculous. He attempted to understand what was happening to him during these violent oscillations, interpreting them as punishments for sin and redemption through God's grace. But this story of sin, punishment, and divine rescue gave him comfort only so long as his inner conviction of redemption remained strong. And conviction disappeared as soon as a new episode of depression began. When that happened, the logic of Cowper's own system of explanation drove him to interpret his renewed melancholy as evidence of deliberate apostasy and hence of damnation.

Cowper once wrote to his cousin Harriot Hesketh: "Dejection of Spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an Author, made me one. I find constant employment necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly employ'd. Manual occupations do not engage the mind sufficiently, as I know by experience, having tried many. But Composition, especially of verse, absorbs it wholly ..." (Cowper, 1981).(1) He was a prolific author and translator, and an indefatigable letter-writer; few of the works he published during his own lifetime suggest that they issued from a mind periodically disordered. But at various times he attempted to express or to understand the violent shifts of mood that had disrupted his life, and the poems and narratives that make up this intermittent literary autobiography reveal with unusual clarity what happens when despair is replaced by hope, and hope gives way again to despair.

Cowper is not, of course, the first poet to write about his own madness. But he is unusual for having written about madness in a number of different literary forms: lyric, hymn, conversational poem, narrative poem, and prose memoir. These different genres imply different stances toward experience, even different interpretations of it. In lyric, he speaks in a voice of unmediated anguish; his hymns mingle recollections of anguish with thanksgiving for redemption; the conversational poems allow him to look at insanity from the perspective of a sympathetic yet fully rational observer; and his prose memoir, Adelphi, written during the period of joy following recovery from the first of his major breakdowns, is a vivid account of a young man's descent into insanity and his subsequent recovery from it, suffused with happiness at restored health and sanity.

William Cowper was born in 1731 to a distinguished family. His father, the Rev. John Cowper, was rector of the parish of Great Berkhamstead, Hertforshire; his mother, Ann Donne, who died when William was six, traced her descent from the family to which the poet John Donne had belonged (Ryskamp, 1959). Cowper's long life can be divided into three major phases. In the first of these, which ends with his first breakdown in 1763, he led the thoughtless life of a young gentleman with an inheritance. Sent to Westminster School and then to the Inns of Court, he spent little time studying law, devoting himself instead to reading, writing, consorting with other young gentlemen of wit, and falling in love. He went through his inheritance rapidly. A tendency to melancholy, constitutional in his family, had already led him through one episode of depression while he was in his early twenties, but since the malady had improved spontaneously, he had dismissed it from his mind.

In 1763 he attempted to secure a clerkship in the House of Lords, a minor appointment controlled by a member of his family. In order to win this appointment, however, he needed to undergo a public examination. The thought of this examination filled him with a dread he recognized as irrational yet was not able to overcome. He tried to prepare himself for the ordeal, but as the date of the examination drew nearer he slipped deeper and deeper into depression. Eventually he attempted suicide.

Committed by his family to the care of a doctor who maintained a private asylum, Cowper endured a depression that continued for about eight months unabated in its intensity. Then his anguish began to lighten, and words of religious comfort spoken to him by his brother convinced him to turn to the Bible for help. Although he had never before been devout, he now became convinced that he owed his recovery to God's mercy.