William Cowper: A Biography by James King (review)

HUMANlTIES I 15 Theseus is a typical practitioner) an anxiety conc.erning the legitimacy of such prodigies that is not dissimilar to Russell's anxiety over non-existent objects. If a thing like a centaur can be imagined does it, in some sense, exist? Whereas Renaissance moralists and neo-Aristotelians are likely to condemn as hubristic all but the most slavishly imitative imaginative acts, Shakespeare delights in the ambiguous status of extravagant fictions, particularly such fictions as Ariel and Puck. It is therefore surprising that Stevens should regard Milton's response to Shakespeare's imagination as a fulfilment of its icastic potential: 'faith,' we are told, 'requires the activity of the icastic imagination' (p 79). This result will seem less strange, however, when it is recognized that Stevens is really talking about the romantic distinction between imagination and fancy, wherein fancy is seen as a defect. And of course the claim that Milton recognized in the 'autonomous imagination of Shakespeare' what he would openly treat as the 'psychological mechanism of faith' fulfilling 'typologically' what Shakespeare could only accomplish in part (pp 247-8) - identifies the argument as late Coleridgean. If the sonnet published with the second folio tells us anything at all, Milton's conscious attitude to Shakespeare was rather more dull than that of the critics. Unlike Maeonides and Phineus and the prophets of old, Shakespeare was not, in the fullest sense of the word, an author to Milton. When Stevens turns his attention directly on Milton he often generates fresh insights into Paradise Lost. His discussion of the heavenly council in Milton's third book is particularly fine, showing the Son's imaginative response to the opposition of Justice and Mercy as turning on its head the Satanic project of building rational structures out of unrestrained fancy. In this episode the imagination is seen not as a tendency to random association - making, as in Hartley and Locke, an unstable basis for thought - but as a unifying force working within from the start and leading the mind on to the truth. Here Stevens's Coleridgean perspective, unencumbered by terms foreign to it, genuinely illuminates Milton's epic. (GORDON TESKEY) James King. William Cowper: A Biography Duke University Press. xiii, 340. $35.00 AsJames King notes in the preface to his William Cowper, there are already over thirty biographies of the poet. Nevertheless, a considerable quantity of primary material has remained unused. As coeditor of Cowper'5 letters , King has helped to make much of this material available. In this biography he draws upon it liberally, providing a density of detail and an abundance of documentation unsurpassed in Cowper studies. King pays particular attention to three or four partly overlapping 116 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 aspects of Cowper's life that he feels earlier biographers have slighted: his poetic career, and more particularly the translation of Homer to which he devoted so much of it; the relations between his life and art; and his madness. Cowper's professionalism certainly has been slighted. King agrees with earlier scholars that Cowper turned to poetry as a kind of occupational therapy, but shows that from the beginning it had to be more than mere therapy in order to be effective therapy. King may agree with the common estimate of the intrinsic merit of Cowper's Homer - he quotes little from it and says little about it in its own right - but he leaves no doubt of its importance to Cowper, and his documentary method is well suited to tracing its evolution. The account of the relations between Cowper's life and art is less successful. King has not allowed enough space for critical commentary to explore the paradox that such a personal poet was also such a formal one. Sometimes, however, he makes a terse but telling comment: 'In The Task, Cowper presents salvation for himself as a distinct possibility. This is poetic license' (p 153). Cowper's madness has hardly been ignored. King tries to provide a clinical discussion, invoking Freud's conception of melancholia, but his anxiety to point out that much of what Freud says is anticipated by Burton and corroborated by contemporary psychologists such as Evna Furman precludes the...