Arts and Humanities Commons^™

William Cowper’S The Task: A Study In Transition, Roy Leo Crady Jr.

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Hidden deep in the shelves of most libraries in England and America is an obscure, dusty volume of poetry containing one of the minor classics in the English language, a poem entitled The Task. Written by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper, this very long and loosely structured poem won widespread recognition and acclaim in its day, only to gradually fade into a premature oblivion. Today The Task is known primarily to a handful of literary scholars whose arcane and esoteric business it is to go beyond the turnpikes of literary history into the labyrinthine lanes and paths of our literary …