Numbers in
brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line
number in parentheses.
R. W. had been at the center of the New
York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties. When I knew him decades later, he habitually
referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically
casual terms. “We were just playing
around.” “Professors come asking me
questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.” “We did things just for the hell of it.” Though earlier versions of Romanticism had
exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged
legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a
cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.
One effect of this pose is to foreground
the value of the aesthetic. If a work of
art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing
the same value in milder terms -- amusing, or stimulating, or simply
diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become
incidental or irrelevant. The poem or
play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant
manner.
This
stance is by no means novel. Catullus
calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests,
idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray
with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”
A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and
I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no
purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born,
according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well
have been a telephone call to a friend.
The eighteenth century is known for
neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity. The era celebrated the imitation of Latin
models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly
conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional
pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real
language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s
conversation poems. The fashion of
posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in
conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in
content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode,
conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2] The turn away from grand themes and settings
is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s
“Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A
Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest
and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’
Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden). Each of these is structured with a casual
colloquialism, as though in conversation.
William Cowper’s The Task, called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table. The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note.
[“The history of the following production
is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from
the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject. He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected
another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his
situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the
trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]
The Task
is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to
impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at
dancing, music, or witty repartee. While
Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for
instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured
on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its
structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next
with no appearance of design.
The author’s intentionality is evident in
the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the
poem [7]. For instance, apart from
calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring”
(III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of
“roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697). So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that
set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad
libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is
freestyling, to use a contemporary term.
in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings.
Thou know'st my praise of nature most
sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
(I, 150-153)
. The first transition following the opening
history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of topic.
The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not
associated with sofas. That article of
furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he
addresses are physically active.
The SOFA suits
The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb
Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk through
lanes . . .
(I, 106-110)
After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of
hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on
the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a
certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably
triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to
venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend. Though it is unclear how the discovery is
linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he
calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where
he might find “the poet’s treasure,
silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236).
This particular dream is short-lived,
however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor
“wretch” (I, 239)
whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature
and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).
Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée
or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for
the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner
John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical
knottiness becomes ornamental.
Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet
These chesnuts ranged in corresponding
lines,
And though himself so polish'd, still
reprieves
The obsolete prolixity of shade.
(262-265)
The final line
is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words
themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake
prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.
Rambling on in the present tense, he then
happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures
earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.” (I, 277)
This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who
carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284). The faintly self-mocking parallel with the
poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be
remembered is unmistakable.
Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed. The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils.
So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they
dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkning and enlightning, as the
leaves
Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.
(345-349)
Though this survey has covered only half
the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not
change. To continue detailing his divagations
would be to belabor the point. Cowper
goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in
the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering
mental associative streams. Like a
scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and
he drifts freely from one to the next. His
many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner.
This offhand procedure is not itself
vacant of meaning. By suggesting that
anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the
possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience
is equally profound. If he risks the
appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life
to be poetry. His assertively
non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that
distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value. Cowper does have preferences and values, and
he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to
another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.
1. Silence.
2. Cowley was followed in this practice by
Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by
Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to
dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions.
3. Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential
essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.
4. Letter to
Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.
5. Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.
6. Cowper was a close friend of John Newton,
author of “Amazing Grace.”
7. For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert
Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer,
1972). Bentman traces a similar use of
“wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.
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