ABSTRACT
William Cowper's writings, especially The Task, mark a turning point in the intersection of literature and religion, in poetry, in England. Cowper began as, and remains, an advocate of Evangelical Christianity, but his distinctive bequest to his successors was a philosophy of well-being rooted in the principle of interaction between self and nature. In Freudian psychology, often useful in interpreting Cowper, compulsive repetition in mental life indicates the return, in displaced and condensed form, of repressed experience. Freud's theory is markedly borne out in the procedures of Cowper's poetry. Jonathan Bate, progenitor of the recent school of eco-criticism, makes no mention of Cowper in his seminal Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Cowper's eco-philosophy and, perhaps more obviously, his weaving of a theory of human-animal relations, both of which stem fundamentally from a respect for God's Creation and a sense of oneness with it, carry religious sensibility onto sociological ground.
