Republic of Uzbekistan Denau Enterpreunership and Pedagogy institute

Republic of Uzbekistan

Denau Enterpreunership and Pedagogy institute

Course Paper

Student: Nurullayeva Nigora., Group 210
Supervisor:AMANOVA A


Denov-2022

Content

Introduction

Chapter I.William Cowper was well known poem in English Literature
1.1.William Cowper’s biograph………………………………………….
1.2. William Cowper was famous writer in litereture in english..
Chapter II. Robert Burns was the most famous Scottish poet of the 18th Century.
2.1. Robert Burns’s biograph and his works……………………………..
2.2.”My Heart’s in the Highlands”……………………………………….

Conclusion

References

Introduction

Towards the end of the Neo-classical period, opposition to Pope’s school of poetry was more or less steadily growing. The writers’ interest in Nature and in the romantic past marked this opposition. Dr. Johnson’s forceful personality held the new tendencies in check for the time, but signs of the change became more and more pronounced as the century advanced to its close. In the last quarter of the century, four poets, each, in his own way, heralded the opening of the second romantic age in English literature. These were Cowper, Crabbe, Blake and Burns.
Besides, in the age of Romanticism in English literature there was a group of poets who represented a bridge between classicism and romanticism. They are called pre-romantics. The leading pre-romantic poet is William Blake. The poetry of Robert Burns, Thomas Gray and William Cowper also bear the features of pre-romanticism. In many of their works the pre-romanticists showed their awareness of social problems and the love of nature that became typical of English romanticism.
The age of classicism is followed by a transitional period know as the pre-romantic age which comes from 1770 to 1798 about the last thirty years of the 18^th century. In fact in this period, in the second half of the 18^th century, we can observe a new sensibility in poetry and a new generation of poets was arising. These poets used subjective, autobiographical materials which marked a new trend towards the expression of a lyrical and personal experience of life. They were less intellectual and more emotional presenting a variety of emotional states of the soul.
Pre-Romantic Poetry intervenes powerfully in debates about eighteenth-century writing, Romanticism, and literary history. By arguing that ‘pre-romanticism’ exists to patrol the limits of ‘romantic’ writing the book questions existing approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, and to period-based study more generally. As well as presenting pioneering re-interpretations of poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry reads late-eighteenth-century poetry alongside earlier writers (especially Alexander Pope) and later ones (including William Wordsworth and John Keats). Paying particular attention to pastoral poetry, patronage, and occasional poetry, the book historicizes questions of language and form in order to shift prevailing notions of eighteenth-century and Romantic writing.




Chapter I.William Cowper was well known poem in English Literature.
William Cowper’s biograph

William Cowper (1731-1800), one of the most-loveable of English poets, came of a good aristocratic family. He was educated at Westminster school whence he went to study law and was called to Bar. His family influence was great, but his prospects in Government service were marred by constitutional morbidity which developed into suicidal mania. Though a couple of years in a lunatic asylum cured him, the blight of melancholy hovered over him all his life. He had to leave London and retire into the country where he passed the rest of his life in the care and company of friends. Most devoted of whom, Mrs. Mary Unwin, the widow of a clergyman, he celebrated in the sentimental verses “To Mary”. It was at her 3 suggestion that he wrote the eight satires - Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation and Retirement – all in heroic couplets, which together with some shorter poems appeared in 1782. The shorter poems of this volume included the well known Boadicea and Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk. Another woman, Lady Austen, suggested the “sofa” in his room as the subject for his next work by way of diversion for the melancholy poet, and the result was The Task in blank verse, one of the most companionable of poems in English language. The same lady told him the story of the London linen-draper immortalised in the ballad of John Gilpin. The volume containing these two as well as Tirocinium, a forceful attack on public schools of the day, appeared in 1785. After this date he produced a translation of Homer, which is dull though dignified, and a number of shorter poems which appeared after his death. These include the famous On the Loss of the Royal George, and To Mary. His last poem, The Castaway, a cry of utter despair was written shortly before his death. Later editions of his poems contained the tender On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture. His close association with Mary Unwin came to an end with her death in 1796. Thereafter the poet lingered in physical and mental misery from which he was released by death in 1800. Every schoolboy essay on country life contains Cowper’s line from The Task: “God made the country and man made the town.” Cowper comes nearer to Wordsworth even than Thomson in his love of Nature, but he weaves no theory or religion about it. He expresses his simple gratitude for the healing influences on Nature on his troubled spirit:

The tide of life, swift always in its cours
May run in cities with a brisker force,
But nowhere with a current so serene,
Or half so clear, as in the rural scene.
Cowper, a Calvinist, was deeply religious in the true sense as is shown by his generous sympathies with the meanest of God’s creatures:
I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm
I would not have a slave to till my ground
To carry me, to fan me when I sleep
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d.
Cowper’s concern for India – India that had been trampled by Warren Hastings and other empire builders – is touchingly shown in these lines:
Is India free? And does she wear her plumed
And jewelled turban with a smile of peace,
Or do we grind her still?
Cowper’s satires are a far cry from Pope’s. In fact there are so many didactic poems containing gentle admonitions not unmixed with playful humour and occasional wit –
The solemn fop; significant and budge;
A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge
His wit invites you by his looks to come.
But when you knock, it never is at home,
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is mind distress’d
He was too gentle for satire. It is in The Task that the real poetic quality of Cowper is shown to the best advantage. He is, however, best known by his shorter poems which are familiar to us in school anthologies. They are the instinctive and spontaneous effusions of a real poet. Their simplicity, naturalness and easy grace constitute their perennial charm. Only those who have never known a mother’s affection can charge Cowper with sentimentality in the poem on his mother’s picture. The charge may be justified to some extent in regard to the poem on Mary, but even here it must be remembered that Cowper and Mary were at one time engaged to be married and that the union was prevented only the recurrence of the poet’s malady. In fact, the sad circumstances of the poet’s life should always be remembered in judging his works.
Historically Cowper was no innovator or revolutionary in poetry. Though it was he who said that Pope –

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Yet he did not disdain to write in couplets, however, rugged and enjambed he deliberately made them. Even his style which is simpler and more natural than that of Pope and his school is not entirely free from its generalising tendency and set poetic diction. It is only in regard to his love of the country and his humanitarianism that he can be said to be looking forward to the romantics. Odd mixture of old and new as he was, he inclined, on the whole, rather to the old than to the new. Judged by bulk, range, and poetic quality Cowper belongs to the great English poets of the second order. Cowper is known today mainly for The Task. A deeply contemplative poet, Cowper structures his poem around the seasons. He also provides some extremely fine portraits of nature, and argues that nature is evidence of God’s existence. Here is a particularly fine piece of description of winter morning:

1.2. William Cowper was famous writer in litereture in english.

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  For the 3 years that Cowper worked in Ely Place, he visited his uncle Ashely in Southampton Row and fell in love with his cousin Theodora. But his father was opposed to the relation and it left him in distress.
  
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  His cousin, Major Cowper, nominated him to a clerkship in the House of Lords in 1763 and it consisted of a preliminary appearance at the bard of the house.
  
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  The prospect made him very anxious and he tried to kill himself by consuming poison. And after trying to commit suicide on three other occasions, he was sent to a lunatic asylum.
  
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  After coming out of the asylum after 18 months, he settled in Huntingdon with a retired clergyman Morley Unwin and his wife Mary. In 1779, after a gospel devote, John Newton, invited him to write a hymnbook, ‘Olney Hymns’ was published
  
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  The book contained hymns like, ‘Praise for the Fountain Opened’, ‘Light Shinning out of Darkness’, etc. Cowper’s ‘Olney Hymns’ as well as other hymns are now preserved in the Sacred Harp.
  
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  In 1773, he suffered an attack of lunacy as he imagined that almighty had condemned him to hell and was asking him to kill himself. Upon getting proper care, Cowper started recovering again after a year’s time.
  
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  Cowper started writing poetry in 1779 - he started with ‘The Progress of Error’ and within three years, he got many poems published under the title of ‘Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner temple, Esq..’.
  
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  In 1785, he got published his next book, ‘The Task: A Poem, in Six Books’, which is a poem in blank verse and is now considered to be his greatest work ever.
  
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  Its six books are called, ‘The Sofa’, ‘The Timepiece’, ‘The Garden’, ‘The Winter Evening’, ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, and ‘The Winter Walk at Noon’.
  
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  In the same volume Cowper also printed ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’, comic verse. The ballad is about a draper called Gilpin who rides a runaway horse. He was inspired by the story when he was severely depressed.
  
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  In 1791, he published his translations of Homer's ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ into blank verse, and his adaptations were the most noteworthy English interpretations of these epic poems since those of Alexander Pope earlier in the century.
  
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  His friend, Mary Unwin, died in 1796 and it left him into a permanent depression. He revised his ‘Homer’ and wrote ‘The Castaway’. He also did some translation work like turning John Gay’s ‘Fables’ into Latin.
  
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  Cowper suffered from grave bouts of depression all his life, the kinds that had sent him to asylums but living with Morley Unwin and his wife Mary Unwin helped him recover from these attacks from time to time.
  
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  After Unwin’s death, Cowper stayed with Mary Unwin and he moved with her wherever she moved to live. Sometime before Unwin’s death, the duo settled in East Dereham.
  
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  He was seized with dropsy in 1800 and passed away of the same. He is buried in the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Nicholas Church, East Dereham.
  
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  Cowper’s ‘The Task: A Poem, in Six Books’ depicts the Evangelical spirit of the age that so beautifully that according to one critic, "As Paradise Lost is to militant Puritanism, so is The Task to the religious movement of its author's time."
  

Religion, however, also provided the comfort of Cowper’s convalescence, which he spent at Huntingdon, lodging with the Reverend Morley Unwin, his wife Mary, and their small family. Pious Calvinists, the Unwins supported the evangelical revival, then a powerful force in English society. In 1767 Morley Unwin was killed in a riding accident, and his family, with Cowper, took up residence at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. The curate there, John Newton, a leader of the revival, encouraged Cowper in a life of practical evangelism; however, the poet proved too frail, and his doubt and melancholy returned. Cowper collaborated with Newton on a book of religious verse, eventually published as Olney Hymns (1779).

William Cowper.