Reframing the 1782 Satires of William Cowper
Abstract
The 1782 Satires remain the least-esteemed of Cowper's major poetic works. Behind this negative response to Cowper's evangelical satire is a tacit assumption that Augustan satire is a relatively neutral medium that Cowper has violated through the insertion of alien, sectarian material. On the contrary, Cowper was wrestling with a medium that traditionally had been hostile to his co-religionists. His attempt to use that medium for evangelical ends leads him to reverse the terms frequently used in attacks on religious enthusiasts. It is, Cowper would argue, among the despised enthusiasts that one finds true rationality and balance. Their despisers, the worldly wise, are the true enthusiasts who have deluded themselves into ignoring the human need for personal salvation. To achieve this sort of reversal, Cowper's Satires portray a balanced evangelical vision centered on the dynamic of sin and salvation. I would suggest that this vision can be most adequately explained as a balance between blessing (an ethos that centers on life in this world) and deliverance (an ethos that centers on eternal salvation) that privileges the latter. Any reading of Cowper's work that takes his evangelical faith seriously must deal with the issues raised by the biography. Accordingly, I present an approach to the biographical problem that into account the painful gap between Cowper's poetic proclamations of evangelical hope and private experiences of despair. Paradoxically, it is Cowper's perceived loss of salvation that makes him uniquely qualified to speak of salvation. How, though, to do so while speaking on behalf of the saved (as he does in the Satires) remained a problem. In the Satires, Cowper attempts to solve the problem by taking a position similar to that of Interpreter in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: he directs reader attention to various edifying images of salvation or damnation, but scrupulously avoids identification with any of them.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
McKenzie, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Biographies
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.