32 Facts About William Cowper

William Cowper was an English poet and Anglican hymnwriter.

One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside.

William Cowper continued to suffer doubt about his salvation and, after a dream in 1773, believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation.

William Cowper recovered, and went on to write more religious hymns.

William Cowper wrote a number of anti-slavery poems, and his friendship with Newton, who was an avid anti-slavery campaigner, resulted in Cowper's being asked to write in support of the Abolitionist campaign.

William Cowper wrote a poem called "The Negro's Complaint" which rapidly became very famous, and was often quoted by Martin Luther King Jr.

William Cowper wrote several other less well-known poems on slavery in the 1780s, many of which attacked the idea that slavery was economically viable.

William Cowper was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, where his father John William Cowper was rector of the Church of St Peter.

William Cowper grew close to her family in his early years.

William Cowper was particularly close with her brother Robert and his wife Harriot.

William Cowper had begun to study Latin from a young age, and was an eager scholar of Latin for the rest of his life.

William Cowper read through the Iliad and the Odyssey, which ignited his lifelong scholarship and love for Homer's epics.

William Cowper grew skilled at the interpretation and translation of Latin, which he put to use for the rest of his life.

William Cowper was skilled in the composition of Latin as well and wrote many verses of his own.

William Cowper's poem beginning "Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portions" was written in the aftermath of his suicide attempt.

William Cowper grew to be on such good terms with the Unwin family that he went to live in their house, and moved with them to Olney.

Not long afterwards, Morley Unwin was killed in a fall from his horse; William Cowper continued to live in the Unwin home and became greatly attached to the widow Mary Unwin.

At Olney, Newton invited William Cowper to contribute to a hymnbook that he was compiling.

In 1773, William Cowper experienced an attack of insanity, imagining not only that he was eternally condemned to hell, but that God was commanding him to make a sacrifice of his own life.

In 1779, after Newton had moved from Olney to London, William Cowper started to write poetry again.

Mary Unwin, wanting to keep William Cowper's mind occupied, suggested that he write on the subject of The Progress of Error.

In 1781 William Cowper met a sophisticated and charming widow named Lady Austen who inspired new poetry.

William Cowper himself tells of the genesis of what some have considered his most substantial work, The Task, in his "Advertisement" to the original edition of 1785:.

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, later credited the writing of "John Gilpin" with saving William Cowper from becoming completely insane.

William Cowper's versions were the most significant English renderings of these epic poems since those of Alexander Pope earlier in the century.

In 1789 William Cowper befriended a cousin, Dr John Johnson, a Norfolk clergyman, and in 1795 William Cowper and Mary moved to Norfolk to be near him and his sister Catharine.

William Cowper did continue to revise his Homer for a second edition of his translation.

William Cowper was seized with edema in the spring of 1800 and died on the 25th of April.

William Cowper is buried in the chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury, St Nicholas's Church in East Dereham, and a stained-glass window there commemorates his life.

In 1823, William Cowper's correspondence was published posthumously from the original letters in the possession of his kinsman John Johnson.

William Cowper was known to visit here frequently for inspiration for his poetry.

William Cowper is represented with fifteen hymns in American Presbyterian Edwin Hatfield's 1872 opus The Church Hymn Book for the Worship of God.