For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper) was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil’s biography (1929) doesn’t celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper’s own words, ‘the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.’ Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression (http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-a-z/D/depression/). His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers.
This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart – the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the biographer’s estimate of character and situation throughout.
320 pages in Constable paperback edition
ISBN 978-0094684300
William Cowper