William Cowper

William Cowper was an English poet, letter writer, translator, and hymn writer born at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in 1731. The son of an Anglican rector, he was educated at Westminster School and trained for the law. A severe mental breakdown in 1763 led to hospitalization at St Albans under the physician Nathaniel Cotton. Cowper recovered sufficiently to settle with the Unwin family at Huntingdon and later moved with Mary Unwin to Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he became a close friend of the evangelical Anglican curate John Newton.

Newton encouraged Cowper to use his literary gifts in devotional writing. During the years before another severe depressive crisis in 1773, Cowper produced many of his major hymns. “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” was first published anonymously in Richard Conyers's “A Collection of Psalms and Hymns” in 1772 and later appeared under Cowper's name in “Olney Hymns” in 1779. Cowper contributed sixty-eight hymns to that collection, including “O for a Closer Walk with God” and the poem beginning “God moves in a mysterious way.”

Cowper's importance extends beyond hymnody. “The Task,” “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” anti-slavery poems such as “The Negro's Complaint,” his letters, and his translations of Homer made him a major English literary figure. His recurrent mental illness should be treated historically and compassionately rather than turned into a simplistic explanation for his faith or poetry.