ABSTRACT
‘The echoes will again become the living voice.’ These words close chapter 6 of Vincent Newey's outstanding work, Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool University Press, 1982: p. 207). His argument at this point, concerning Cowper's otherwise settled conclusion toThe Task, proposes that in spite of the poet's putative desire for repose, his wish for life to ‘glide […] away’ ‘peaceful in its end’, we can sense ‘unhappy, desperate, isolated’ currents running through the poetry. Yet the chapter's final sentence does more than simply restate the case. Accompanying the idea that Cowper's authenticity as a poet emerges not from the certain and fixed but from the unsettled and unresolved, comes too an undeniable affirmation of life. Here, with ‘echoes’ promising to become ‘the living voice’ yet once more – the thing itself rather than its dying memory – the creative mind is assured of its rebirth, returning to existence through poetry: a marvellous process, for poet and reader alike, of mythopoeic resurrection and psychopoeic self-assertion.
