News, Blues, and Cowper's Busy World.(William Cowper)(Critical Essay)

The scholarly standing of newspapers has risen dramatically as cultural studies and studies of print culture have converged. Newspapers represent a communicative economy fundamental to a nation's understanding of itself and of its relationship to other countries and peoples. Social theory, social history, and literary studies meet at the intersection of Benedict Anderson and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). [1] As a result, we know that newspapers were an important medium of British culture in the eighteenth century. As we sort out the dimensions of that culture, we need to gauge the relationship of newspapers to other media and genres, including literary ones. What good are newspapers to poets? What good are poets to newspapers?

By the late eighteenth century the news could be explicitly described as a catalyst for translating social variety into consumable art. William Cowper (1731-1800) was the earliest and most influential adapter of the newspaper to reflective poetry. Traumatically excluded from his early professional career in the family practice of law and parliamentary administration, he was unusually receptive to metropolitan affairs as refracted through the papers. Cowper therefore helped craft the sensibility that allows us to think about the news as a cultural system. Drawing on standard poetic strategies of the period--fancy, the prospect, genre scenes--Cowper assimilated the public prints into The Task (1785). He was the first English poet to gentrify the press by means of a provincial aesthetic of retired masculinity. [2] But why should Cowper have been the agent for the aesthetic legitimation of the press?

"I Know Nothing But What I Learn from the General Evening"

Two major English poets were writing about newspapers in 1784: Cowper and George Crabbe. The timing was not accidental, for the news was on everyone's mind. The American war had ended in defeat, George III's use of the prerogative to dismiss the Fox-North ministry had led to party clashes, and Parliament was debating British policies in India and Ireland. The general election of April 1784 returned Pitt with a large Tory majority. "I read Johnson's prefaces every night [except] when the Newspaper calls me off," Cowper wrote in February 1784 to William Unwin, a sort of honorary nephew. "At a time [like the] present, what Author can stand in competition with a Newspaper?" [3]

Crabbe had completed his poem The News-paper just before the election of 1784; it appeared in mid-March 1785. Grabbe understood the popularity of the newspaper well enough to want to hitch his own to it. [4] But he was uneasy at the apparent randomness of newspaper material and frustrated by the difficulty of representing in verse the "dissociating articles ... huddled together in our Daily Papers" (Poetical Works, 1:179). Crabbe fully appreciated the "charm" of the news for those "who, far from town, / Wait till the post-man brings the packet down" (Poetical Works, 1:189). But he could not dramatize the provincial reader or the scenes in which that reader hungrily consumed the paper's "dissociating" elements and turned them into an aesthetic rendering of the "busy life" of the world. [5] Of course, dissociation and the busy world are hallmarks of any number of eighteenth-century poems, and we can discover myriad connections between journalistic and poetic discourse before Cowper. The question is, what did i t take for a poet fully to accept his or her place in the economy of the news?

The connection of the newspapers--"rival sheets of politics and prose"--with party contests was so strong that the need to sequester serious poetry from "daily, dirty scandal-scrapers" was paramount for Crabbe, as for most of his contemporaries (Poetical Works, 1:190). [6] In The Dunciad Alexander Pope had referred to the political newspaper as "the common Sink" of "low" and "illiterate" writers, and little had changed since then. [7] John Wolcot, writing as Peter Pindar, called the papers "trash down the throats of the nauseating people of England." [8] These views would not change anytime soon. [9] In the face of this prejudice, Cowper made the appeal of the daily press explicit.

Cowper saw the scandalous and partisan aspects of the press, but in the end he minded them less than others did. As though inoculated against their ill effects by geography, religion, and psychological condition, he translated newspapers into poetry. The first half of book 4 of The Task, which stages the arrival and reading of the newspaper and the reflections stimulated by it, stands out from the uniformly hostile treatment of the daily press in eighteenth-century verse. Both newspaper reading and poetry writing became for Cowper part of a carefully mediated long-distance relationship to metropolitan cultural and political life.

Cowper's specific cultural situation helps explain why the real and the symbolic value of the newspaper for him eventually counteracted the standard bias of contemporary intellectuals against the fragmented, partisan nature of the genre. The eldest surviving son of a family of Whig lawyers, clergymen, and upper civil servants, he was himself trained as an attorney. His literary proclivities were fulfilled through his membership in the Nonsense Club, sometimes called "the Geniuses." His marriage to a cousin was blocked by her father and his uncle, Ashley Cowper, holder of the Clerkship of the Parliaments. In 1763 Cowper accepted from his uncle and patron the Clerkship of the Journals in the House of Lords. But because of questions about Ashley Cowper's activities, Cowper was called to be examined on his qualifications at the Bar of the House. Facing a public interrogation that loomed before him for months, he "began to look upon madness as the only chance [for escape] remaining," as he recalled in "Adelphi," his conversion narrative of 1767. After a paranoic reading of a letter in the newspaper that "appeared demonstrably ... [to be] a libel or satire upon me" and that urged him to "self-murder," he attempted suicide (Prose, 1:19-20, 27). [10] During this time, Cowper uncharacteristically disparaged the press as "trash" and "scandal." Viewing a published letter as libelous or satiric, he drew on the anti-newspaper vocabulary of Crabbe, Pope, and Wolcot. Cowper left London in late 1763 for an asylum at Saint Albans.

Cowper's adult life thenceforth was shaped by his long contest with …