ABSTRACT
By 1780 the mid-century poets were mostly gone, and a new generation was arising. In it among the most distinguished were William Cowper, Robert Burns, William Blake, George Crabbe, and Samuel Rogers.1 Cowper and Burns alike mark a tendency to use subjective, autobiographical material and to write of rural domesticity: they were among the latest flowerings in the eighteenth century of the cult of simplicity. Since it chances that Cowper’s dates (17311800) are exactly a century later than John Dryden’s, it is interesting to compare these last voices in the neo-classic choir (if indeed they belong there) with the tones of Dryden and Pope, the partial founders of the tradition. Obviously the century elapsed has grown tender;. Burns and Cowper both write satires, but these are relatively good-humored-perhaps too good-humored. Cowper’s satire in particular lacks hardness, flash, and cutting edge. Burns, like Dryden and Pope, has sympathetic, generalized observations to make about man, but like Blake and Cowper he is most aroused concerning underprivileged men. Burns and Blake have faith in progress and in the ability of man to achieve his own destiny. Cowper, like Dryden and Pope, has a sense of man’s limitations; but Cowper would haye man rely on God’s help, on a divine plan, whereas Pope had fitted man into a philosophic chain of being, in which duty urges him to be a competent link or a submerged atom. There is, however, little in the observations of these later poets about man that would revolt Dryden or Pope, and both Cowper and Burns echo the Essay on Man with some sympathythough Cowper could tolerate no attempt (such as Pope’s fundamentally seemed) to build up a moral philosophy independent of religion. The earlier poets had featured impersonal material, “what oft was thought”; Cowper and Burns stress what they have thought and felt, though they value impersonal aphoristic wisdom. The later poets tend to talk to themselves or to a small audience; they lack-Cowper always and Burns usually-the loud, noble eloquence of the earlier poets. The tendency is increasingly subjective and lyrical; it expresses not so eagerly an acquired wisdom of life as it does a personal experience of life. The later poets are less intellectual than Dryden and Pope, more intimately emotional. Cowper and Burns are transitional poets.
