ABSTRACT
It can be difficult today to understand William Cowper's phenomenal success and reputation as a poet at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Reviews of Cowper's first major publication, the 1782 Poems, were mixed, but the critical acclaim for the Task when it appeared in 1785 was immediate and overwhelming, matched by an even more overwhelming success in sales which continued long past Cowper's death. As a result of The Task, Cowper became the most famous and celebrated living poet in England until his death in 1800. 1 He retained this high reputation well past the middle of the next century, especially among the middle-class book-buying public which continued to purchase his works en masse even after his reputation began to decline among critics. The large Evangelical audience bought him for his religion. Some readers, such as the Brontë sisters, felt an irresistible impulse to identify with Cowper the man, especially after his mental sufferings became public knowledge. Others, such as Jane Austen, Hannah More, and George Eliot, admired his solid, gentlemanly morality; and still others found in him an expression of quintessential middle-class Englishness. 2 Cowper never defined his authorship in terms of the print market, but his success owed more to the book-buying commercial public than to the acclaim of the literary elite.
