Poetry written late in life is of
course free from youthful crudity and extravagance. It also escapes
the youthful tendency to imitation. Cowper's authorship is ushered in
by Southey with a history of English poetry; but this is hardly in
place; Cowper had little connexion with anything before him. Even his
knowledge of poetry was not great. In his youth he had read the great
poets, and had studied Milton especially with the ardour of intense
admiration. Nothing ever made him so angry as Johnson's Life of
Milton. "Oh!" he cries, "I could thrash his old jacket till I made his
pension jingle in his pocket." Churchill had made a great--far too
great--an impression on him, when he was a Templar. Of Churchill, if
of anybody, he must be regarded as a follower, though only in his
earlier and less successful poems. In expression he always regarded as
a model the neat and gay simplicity of Prior. But so little had he
kept up his reading of anything but sermons and hymns, that he learned
for the first time from Johnson's Lives the existence of Collins.
Pages:
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83