William Cowper

author

William Cowper

1731–1800

A major English poet and hymn writer, he brought everyday feeling and the English countryside into 18th-century verse in a fresh, intimate way. His work was widely loved in his lifetime and helped point poetry toward the Romantic age.

2 Audiobooks

The Works of William Cowper His life, letters, and poems, now first completed by the introduction of Cowper's private correspondence

The Works of William Cowper His life, letters, and poems, now first completed by the introduction of Cowper's private correspondence

by William Cowper

The Task, and Other Poems

The Task, and Other Poems

by William Cowper

About the author

Born in Hertfordshire in 1731, William Cowper became one of the most widely read English poets of his time. He is especially known for writing with unusual directness about ordinary life, nature, friendship, and faith, helping to shift English poetry away from polished formalism and toward a more personal voice.

Cowper also wrote hymns, many of them in collaboration with John Newton for Olney Hymns (1779). Alongside his poetry, these devotional writings gave him a lasting place in literary and religious history. His best-known longer poem, The Task (1785), is often praised for its conversational style and vivid attention to the natural world.

His life was marked by recurring periods of severe mental distress, which shaped both his private life and his writing. Even so, his poems remain admired for their tenderness, clarity, and emotional honesty, and for the way they connect deep feeling with the details of everyday experience.