The Task (poem)
| Author | William Cowper |
|---|---|
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Blank verse poem |
| Publisher | Joseph Johnson |
|
Publication date
|
1785 |
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things. Cowper's subjects are those that occur to him naturally in the course of his reflections rather than being suggested by poetic convention, and the diction throughout is, for an 18th-century poem, unusually conversational and unartificial. As the poet himself writes,
My raptures are not conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine.
Cowper prefaced The Task with an account of its genesis:
A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the Author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed; and, having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair – a Volume.
Lady Austen, a friend of Cowper's in the early 1780s, made this suggestion in the early summer of 1783, and he took the idea up, continuing in spite of sporadic returns of the depressive illness from which he suffered so much. On its completion the following year the poem was sent to Cowper's publisher Joseph Johnson, who had previously issued Cowper's Poems (1782). It was decided to add three shorter poems, An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Tirocinium and The Diverting History of John Gilpin, but, because of delays on Johnson’s part, the book did not appear until 1785. The venture was successful, and was soon followed by a second edition of the Poems in two volumes, The Task and its three attendants forming the second volume. Further editions were called for at short intervals for the next 40 years, for The Task had so caught the Evangelical spirit of the age that, according to one critic, "As Paradise Lost is to militant Puritanism, so is The Task to the religious movement of its author's time."
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