'I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also'

I acknowledge that William Cowper never rises to the first rank of poets but his Poems (1931) in the Everyman’s Library edition – complete and yet modestly sized in 428 pages – rests on the shelf closest to my desk, between volumes by Edwin Arlington Robinson and Walter de la Mare. I read him often. His complicated personality – intermittently mad and suicidal, yet devout and always amusing with friends, a lover of hares and other animals – makes him a character worthy of a novel by Jane Austen, who was among his devoted admirers. Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful: “I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all…